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lack of involvement in the kernel != lack of involvement in free softwarelack of involvement in the kernel != lack of involvement in free softwarePosted Jul 25, 2007 19:03 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: lack of involvement in the kernel != lack of involvement in free software by stevenj Parent article: Where have the universities gone?
Several projects of my old home the Electronics and Computer Science school of the University of Southampton are GPL'd including GNU Eprints. It's true though that there's pressure to commercialise. I think its necessary to approach those with the power to make such decisions and force them to make the choice, commercialise (perhaps without you) or free the code. Sometimes it's possible to do both, but it doesn't pay to confuse them with more options. Too often an interesting project just rots on someone's hard disk. If it's going to rot, at least let it rot on a SourceForge site where someone else might stumble over it and re-use it rather than on a postgrad's desktop machine where it probably isn't even backed up.
In my last research work at ECS I was working with some BSD origin code that had somehow acquired a "no commercial use" legend from some US university that had worked on it. I maintained a modified version half-heartedly for 6-12 months by which time someone had written something rather better from scratch under a Free license. Perhaps the rewrite was needed anyway, but I suspect not, such a waste.
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