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A scientific basis for Open Source SoftwareA scientific basis for Open Source SoftwarePosted May 19, 2012 14:37 UTC (Sat) by magi (subscriber, #4051)Parent article: A scientific basis for Open Source Software I have thought that this is a good idea for a long time. However, the other problem will be to convince the scientist to release their code as open source. I don't think that commercialisation is such a big issue (at least in the field where I am working), but the bigger issue is one of control:
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A scientific basis for Open Source Software Posted May 19, 2012 17:43 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] In my experience, the researcher is usually happy to release the software as open source, but university management often interferes, because they hope to obtain money from licensing anything that turns out to be valuable. Some universities in the US treat software developed by researchers as a profit center.One workaround could be to use GPLv3 and let the licensing people sell alternative licensing.
A scientific basis for Open Source Software Posted May 19, 2012 20:40 UTC (Sat) by emk (guest, #1128) [Link]
Yup. Or just speak the university lawyers earlier in the process.
Shrug and say, "Look, this might be useful to some researcher somewhere, but it would be an epic failure as commercial technology transfer. It's just half-baked, and the entire market is probably a half-dozen other broke academics. If we sunk in $50–150K of startup costs and a year of our professional lives, we might scrape up $5K of sales if those academics busted their budgets. Frankly, we're better off spending the time writing more grants."
"If you want to maintain some commercial rights on the off chance that anybody, anywhere ever cares, we can go ahead a slap a strict 'share and share alike' license (such as the GPLv3) on it, and reserve the right to license it under alternate terms if somebody wants to pay us."
I've successfully made this pitch at two major research universities. In my experience, if you have the backing of your PI, your lawyers will probably go along.
A scientific basis for Open Source Software Posted May 20, 2012 9:28 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
As much as I dislike the GPL, it has an additional benefit in science: with some grants, you have to transfer copyrights to all software that is produced, *except* when you can't. In such cases, if you can argue that you need to expand an *existing* GPL-licensed project, you can often get a waiver (for copyright transfer) for deliverables that involve that particular software.
In other words: licensing scientific software under a strong copyleft license could make life easier for other scientists who want to expand your work.
A scientific basis for Open Source Software Posted May 21, 2012 15:53 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
The GPL is no obstacle to transferring the copyright. What do you think the FSF has long demanded for contributions to many GNU projects?
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