[lug] Open Source Software Licenses & the University

[rm at fabula.de]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 02:35:50PM -0700, Daniel Webb wrote:
> 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?  

Well, the software mentioned above is at least partly non-kosher.
Harvest - at least in it's standard configuration uses Glimpse from
UoArizona as it's indexing engine and that piece of software 
(crappy, if i might say so) definitly isn't free ...
(free for 'non-commercial' and educational/government use).


> 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.

Sadly that's a very valid and important remark. Users of OSS really need
to chack that whoever put an OSS licence in a project was actually legaly
entitled to do so.

  Ralf Mattes

> 
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