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Intel Mandates Universities Receiving Funds Not File Patents

sproketboy writes "Since January, four U.S. universities have agreed to host Intel Science and Technology Centers that will be funded at the rate of $2.5 million a year for five years. But wait, there's a catch: the company has made it a condition that in order to receive the millions, your university must open source any resulting software and inventions that come out of this research funding."

4 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:First to file? by psst · · Score: 5, Informative

    In that scenario, the university publishes the idea and it becomes prior art.

  2. Re:It's competitive. by mfh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You get to a point where you realize that as soon as you spend a shitload of money trying to corner the market on something, the time you've wasted ends up giving the competition a leg-up in a new area you SHOULD have been spending that time and energy working on.

    Just open source fucking everything and use it to make money on support. There is no gross margin in hardware anymore, and none in the perceivable future -- and Intel knows it.

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  3. Re:Intel is wrong... uh ... wait by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I like bashing faceless mega corporations as much as the next guy, but this seems to be ... a benign act.

    It's worse than that ... it's almost designed to improve the overall state of the art, without Intel gaining exclusive access to the research, thereby making it possible for just anybody to gain from this. I'm outraged.

    I mean, that's almost communism. No patents? No royalties? No licensing fees? No lawyers? Just good old fashioned university research opened up for all to see?

    Do you realize how badly this could cripple the economy? ;-)

    (Kidding aside ... I wonder if the academic journals would muck with this somehow. They take copyright of the papers, for instance.)

    I do applaud Intel for this ... when I first read this, I thought the string was they they get the patents. This really is funding open research.

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  4. Re:It's competitive. by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It doesn't prevent AMD benefiting from the useful technology, it just prevents the patents. That's the ideal situation. They're providing an incentive to invent things without the temporary monopoly.

    Agreed. I see nothing at all wrong with this restriction.

    Given that Intel funded them they could have asked for ownership, but instead asked for Open Sourcing any developments. Good on Intel.

    Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents.

    I simply can't get incensed about this. Its a clever way to give back to society something bigger than you have in your own inventory.

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