[lug] Open Source Software Licenses & the University

[Daniel Webb]

On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Rob Nagler wrote:

> > 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
>
> Harvest which evolved to Squid is was a CU CS project:
>
> http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/1998/icp-sq/
> http://www.freshports.org/www/squid/
>
> I'm sure there others.

  I wonder if these projects you and other people mentioned are really
kosher, or if the tech transfer office just doesn't mess with them?  In
other words, if any of these projects suddenly had huge commercial
potential, would tech transfer step in and say, "You know, you didn't have
the copyright control to release that software"?  I was warned a year ago
by someone who worked in tech transfer at CU two or three years ago that
that was a possibility and that tech transfer had no real policy on
software tech transfer.  I'm glad that has changed, and I highly doubt
they will mess with programs that are already out there now that they are
supporting open source licenses.