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Where have the universities gone?Where have the universities gone?Posted Jul 24, 2007 18:51 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)Parent article: Where have the universities gone? That's the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), not Berkeley University. It's not only the birthplace of BSD, but also of Tcl/Tk, the Gimp, and large amounts of electronic design automation software. There's been increasing pressure on universities in the US to try to turn their research into funding, and even at institutions with a long history of free software development (e.g. UC Berkeley) there's often internal pressure on professors and grad students to work with the university's licensing office to try to bring some money in, with the money divided between the university and the relevant professors and research teams.
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Berkeley Posted Jul 24, 2007 18:55 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Sigh, I knew that. I blame the fact that my last visit to UCB was to see a Grateful Dead concert... Fixed.
Bayh-Dole? Posted Jul 24, 2007 21:01 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] What about Bayh-Dole, the "Turn Universities Into Patent Trolls Act"? After Bayh-Dole passed, US universities seem to have spent the 1980s ramping up their licensing departments.Also, how many of the "amateur" and "unaffiliated" developers are really university-affiliated, but contributing under another email address? Some people do Free Software work that counts as a project for the university, but host it or contribute it in a way that's not easily traceable to the university.
Bayh-Dole? Posted Jul 24, 2007 23:50 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I had considered mentioning Bayh-Dole, but a lot of university free software came out after it was passed, so its impact is sometimes exaggerated.
Bayh-Dole? Posted Jul 25, 2007 1:24 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] But big institutions can sometimes react slowly to changes -- maybe universities needed time to tighten policies and staff up their licensing departments after Bayh-Dole was passed.
(If you're at a university, maybe you should find an existing project under a reciprocal license and contribute to that instead of starting your own.)
Bayh-Dole? Posted Jul 26, 2007 1:07 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] Well, I can say one thing on that, as someone who's signed UC intellectual property forms: the idea of code copyright the UC Regents being released under a free license today is... implausible. I'm sure it happens from time to time, but only if there are particular sympathetic PIs/managers involved. I suspect that some of this code is still making it into free software with a personal copyright attribution on it instead of the UC Regents copyright attribution, but at that point it disappears from an article like this's statistics.
A similar problem for these statistics is simply that there are more email providers these days. It used to be you took the university's email address and were grateful, but these days most of my classmates' emails are @gmail.com or the like. People hacking on a company's dollar are going to use their official company email address as per official or unofficial policy; students slacking off from studying don't have any comparable incentive; that could skew things.
Where have the universities gone? Posted Jul 24, 2007 20:39 UTC (Tue) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link] Even more than the pressure to commercialize is that, at some universities, the approval to release code as free software comes from the tech transfer unit, which will only approve the release of software that it doesn't think will turn a buck. So it's often not a question of whether a faculty member *wants* to release something as free software, it's whether he or she will be *allowed* to, and the number of hoops through which to jump in order to do so. With all of the other obligations under which faculty labor, releasing code often just falls by the wayside.
Where have the universities gone? Posted Jul 25, 2007 19:55 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link] Yeah, it's gotten much more rigorous, the hoops you have to jump through to get to release open source software. If I want to so much as publish a GPL'ed Perl script, I have to prepare a notification packet and send it off to the Campus Intellectual Property Committee so that they will know that the material has been released.
I can still do it, to be sure, but the effort required really does throw a not insignificant bit of friction into the process.
Where have the universities gone? Posted Jul 26, 2007 14:09 UTC (Thu) by grantingram (subscriber, #18390) [Link] Of course the FSF have had something to say about this: Releasing Free Software if you work at a University. This essay suggests two useful strategies:
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