Where have the universities gone? [LWN.net]

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 24, 2007 20:39 UTC (Tue) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029)
In reply to: Where have the universities gone? by JoeBuck
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

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.

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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.