[lug] Open Source Software Licenses & the University

[Andrew Gilmore]

Daniel Webb wrote:
> I know several of you are at the University, so I'm forwarding this along.
> I found out yesterday that I will almost certainly be able to GPL my
> graduate research here at Colorado, which is great.  What I thought was
> weird is that I am only the third or fourth person to do so.  The first
> was within the last year (on a BSD license).  All the people to do so thus
> far are in Physics.  What's the deal with that?  Don't we have a computer
> science department?  I'm in engineering, so I don't know too much about
> computer science at Colorado, but it's embarrasing to me that
> there haven't been any major computer science projects open sourced from
> our University.

I would love to see the research center I used to work for open source 
its software, but they are very focused on trying to recover just the 
maintainance costs. These costs are about 200K/year, and they are 
licensing the software to try to recover them.

That, for me, is the question I have yet to find a good answer for. How 
do you pay the costs of maintainance of a large program? I'm talking 
hardware and people time, mostly.

This may not be as big of a problem when the program has very wide 
appeal, but the software I worked on is large, complicated, and has a 
small set of applicability.

Comments on this? If this had started as an open source project, it 
would perhaps be less difficult. Note that I am not talking about the 
costs of new development, which are running >1M a year.


> Also, I noticed an email address in the header when I received this was
> an address @microsoft.com.  I have heard that computer science here is
> Microsoft-dominated (or funded), which would explain the stinginess. That
> was just a rumor, so please correct me on that if I'm wrong.
> 

Evi Nemeth, one of the three authors of the bible on UNIX system 
adminstration, works in the CS department. They can't be all that 
Microsoft dominated.

sudo, for one, was at least partially built by the CS Ops people.

The guy that wrote xearth is also at CU, last I checked.

> 
> forwarded message:
> ----------
>          Open Source Software Licenses & the University
> 
> For CU faculty members interested in distributing university software
> under open source licenses, there are a myriad of different license models
> and terms
> to consider.  The University of Colorado Technology Transfer Office is
> presenting a program on Dec. 10th (Tuesday), 3:30-5:00pm, at UMC 415, that
> will explore some of these issues.  Professor Phil Weiser from the CU Law
> School will discuss the legal and intellectual property issues inherent in
> various licenses and terms.  David Allen, AVP for Tech. Transfer will
> discuss the policy and procedure for releasing faculty developed software
> under open
> source licenses.  Please join the TTO in fostering an environment at CU
> that facilitates this important method of technology transfer.  If you
> plan to attend, please RSVP with Lynn.pae at cu.edu.

The university keeps 25% of the licensing fees, and the author of the 
program gets to personally keep 25% as well. There may be some financial 
motives here as well.

Andrew