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Universities, the GPL and Patents?
nonlnear asks: "I'm about to finish a PhD in Mathematics and am starting to realize that I am not a big fan of my university's policy about inventions, patents, software, and the like. The gist of it is: you invent while working here => we own everything => we will patent everything. I am planning on a career in academia, but am very conflicted about this way of doing things. What Universities out there will allow me to publish (otherwise patentable) software under the GPL?"
Just because something is patented doesn't mean it can't be released under the GPL.
The GPL is a licence for granting specific permissions for people to use what *you* (still) own.
In particular, the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL) only allows non-commercial software to use your copyrighted/patented work, so you can still make a good business licensing it to commercial users.
That said, the current version of the GPL is great for licensing copyright, but somewhat murky on more complex patent issues in a global market, and that is what is being improved in GPL version 3.
The easiest way to force something under the GPL or other copyleft licenses is to make a derivative work from GPLed code. So consider using the GNU Scientific Library or something similar as your base. Your University will most likely not make you rewrite it and, if they have a legal department, will most likely not ask you to violate the GPL.
For a good piece on GPL in academia, see Releasing Free Software if you work at a University by Richard Stallman.
On further research, it looks like I was wrong. According to U of T's Copyright policy the university holds the copyright to anything "created by an Author in the course of the Author's employment by the University." On the other hand, "For the purposes of this Policy, research and instruction, or the creation of instructional Works, including Instructional Software, undertaken by members of the University's Teaching Staff or librarians shall not be deemed to be made or undertaken in the course of their employment by the University." This leaves me thoroughly confused, which is about par for the course.
However, in another twist in this dramatic story " Computer Software that is not Instructional Software will be deemed to be an "Invention" under the Inventions Policy, and the rights and obligations with respect to such Computer Software and the disposition of revenues therefrom shall be in accordance with the Inventions Policy." This Invention Policy says that the university essentially everything you make in your office.
So, we're no different than anyone else, but damn if we don't have the best student union in the greater Canadas.
Sleep is for the weak!
The University of Waterloo in Canada generally makes a selling point of the fact that staff, faculty, students, RAs, etc retain ownership of any copyrights or patents that stem from their research.
The situation the poster describes is, I think, atypical. In my experience (and I've been faculty for 22 years) virtually all universities concede to their faculty the copyright on what they write as part of their research or teaching. The only situation I can think of in which the university gets the copyright is when a faculty member writes something at the behest of the university. For instance, if you're one of a number of people who write a policy manual, the university will normally hold the copyright on that. But it is unheard of in my experience for the university to hold the copyright on research publications by faculty.
Patents are another story. Policies vary quite a bit. A common one is that the university has the right of first refusal. If they turn it down, its yours. If they decide they want it, you get a certain percentage of the profit.
Software, naturally, is sort of in between, being something written and typically protected by copyright, but at the same time more in the nature of a "thing" or a "product". In practice, lots of software is released under the GPL or BSD licenses. Roughly speaking, the less obvious commercial value the software has, the more closely it is tied to your research, and the smaller the group of people who work on it, the more likely you'll be able to release it freely. If you write a compiler for the cool new dysfunctional language you've designed, all by yourself, the odds are they'll never even notice, much less care. If, on the other hand, a bunch of people create something that looks like a product and looks like a money-maker, the university may take a different view of things. If they can argue that you've used a lot of university resources (other than your research time), that will make it look more like it belongs to them.
People have sometimes gotten into trouble with big projects like this. Stephen Wolfram left Cal Tech when he got into a fight with them over the ownership of SMP, the symbolic math program that he had written, essentially the predecessor to Mathematica.
My impression is that unless you get involved in things like SMP that look really attractive as products, releasing software is generally not a big problem, though some places will want to use a BSD-type license instead of the GPL. I'd be curious to see if anyone else on Slashdot knows of problems of this sort arising in practice.