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Showing messages 1 through 16 of 16.

• Publicly Funded Research Open Code
  2008-02-17 13:32:35  stvgrnfld [View]
  
  
  I think research that produces code which is funded by public dollars should be open source.
  Take the counter position, that it may becme privately-owned, then why should the public fund a windfall to a private owner? Once the public funds the code, the code becomes public property.
  
  I saw an article (www.CollectiveWizdom.com) on this I think.

• And closed source.
  2003-04-04 17:53:22  sophiax [View]
  
  
  I wonder if anyone has looked at the licencing agreements on some of the commercial bio-informatics software recentley. Or more to the point the commercial software that was written using open source.
  
  I can name one or two companies who have activation key systems that make Microsoft XP's licencing system look tame. And yet when you hack into this stuff you find what? some evidence of open source having being used.
  
  I dont know about the debate as it stands here, but if anything is stifling innovation or science
  as far as I am concerned it is the "Worse than Gates" behaviour of some commercial bio-informatics software houses.
  
  As I say I wont mention any specific companies, but we all know who they are.
  
  Sophie

• O'Reilly network
  2002-11-08 00:43:50  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I believe Andrew has a point. I believe that public funding is a vital function of reserch. however,I also feel that is of utmost importance to reward
  those who how have made a difference. That is capitalism and that is the reason why we are all here
  in this forum.

• Truly free licensing, not GPL
  2002-01-16 08:10:37  brettglass [View]
  
  
  Code developed with taxpayer dollars should be licensed under truly free licenses -- such as the MIT X license or the BSD License -- and not the GPL. To do otherwise would deprive taxpayers -- who paid for the original research -- of the opportunity to benefit from building upon the results of that research. We must prevent the GPL from "infecting" the fruits of research and thereby destroying incentives for others to take it further.
  
  --Brett Glass
  

• Disingeneous argument
  2002-01-16 07:19:51  chip_coons [View]
  
  
  Andrew Dalke argues the philosophy of:
  
  "If the public pays for the research, it should have access to the results of that research."
  
  As being too vague, then provides supposed conflict on constitutional grounds:
  
  "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
  
  - Article I, Section 8, Clause 8
  
  Which is the constitutional basis for patents, not licenses.
  
  For a patent to be issued, the code must be disclosed as well to demonstrate that is a unique idea or invention and it must in-turn identify prior art on which it is built.
  
  Publishing code under an open-source or free license does not abridge the rights of the publisher (copyright still holds) or the patent holder (they can put limits on the license as the author himself notes with some proprietaty/educational licenses).
  
  I think the real question is, as a taxpayer, why should I pay someone to develop a proprietary software tool which they can then make more money off of?
• Disingeneous argument
  2002-01-16 13:13:26  dave-man [View]
  
  
  Hmmm. A more interesting question is "why should the public pay someone to develop a software tool that they then charge us again to use?"
  
  In most of my contractual dealings with the federal government, the government has non-exclusive rights in data in perpetuity. In other words, they can use the tool forever without paying any more for it (support is a separate consideration). The developer may however also retain rights to the code, and sell/lease/license it commercially as they wish.
  
  A similarly interesting, follow-on question is "To what extent, if at all, should the rights of the government flow through to the citizen taxpayers it (the government) purports to represent and serve?"

• I wish it was that simple...
  2002-01-15 21:24:03  cerdo [View]
  
  
  While the pro-team looks at licensing issues as things that could be "resolved reasonably easily", it comes at the core on Dalke's arguments. Looks like a third party needs to be included on this issue: the private software companies. On a utopian world, with everyone looking towards the improvement of science, Stewart and Mangalam's proposition will work nicely. Since that is not the case the options are to either accept today's environment of capitalistic competition and embrace it, or to go around the software companies and private competitors, creating our own code. As Dalke's confirms, it would take us years to repeat some current copyrighted software into open source, eliminating the last option due to nonproductive redundancy. I would have to agree with Dalke's opinion, and shake the foundation of the pro-team with this question: If your interest is really to give back to the public what came out with public money, would'nt it make more sense to have the university sell the rights of software produced on its premises, by its students and educators, and funded by educational grants, so the university would use the money from those proceeds to fund more projects and activities of its own? I ask this since the pro-team's proposition comes straight out of a utopian world...where universities invest the revenues of technology it sells back into its faculty, students and R&D programs.

• Not a valid reason...
  2002-01-15 16:34:53  hamnrye [View]
  
  
  The opposing viewpoint is "Since we have to use closed source, it would be impossible to do this." This is incredibly myopic. But we can get these programs written faster with closed alternatives.... More hogwash.
  
  The real truth of it is this. If we wait ten more years to pass something like this, there will be an ever increasing number of proprietary apps wormed through our research code. There is nothing so pressing in science that it cannot afford to be done right. (In fact, we should probably slow the march of progress long enough to perfect what we have anyway...)
  
  The author of the opposing viewpoint carps about the millions of lines of proprietary code that would have to be re-written first. Would this be easier in ten years?? No.
  
  The author comments on some proprietary projects of his own he has in mind. Fine, don't produce them with public money.
  
  My belief is that public money should benefit the public. If this had been in place ten years ago, the state of computer programming the world over would be that much better. Just like an author reads Melville, Hawthorne, etc. to learn to write well, so could we study this large public codebase as programmers, and see how the pro's do it.
  
  If the academic world in infested with proprietary software, it is time to eradicate the vermin. Besides, some programmer(s) will just end up getting a grant to re-write the proprietary portions. You can't honestly tell me that this would be more drastic than Y2K prep, or a BSA audit. Or are you against programmers working??
  
  ~Hammy

• possible compromise
  2002-01-15 15:11:33  jbuck [View]
  
  
  Yes, yes, there are problems with the initiative
  because many researchers currently depend on
  non-open-source software; there are other issues
  as well.
  
  On the other hand, there are very serious ethical
  issues with the status quo: professors paying grad
  students minimum wage to do the work, then using
  it to start a company. (Many universities claim
  that their research assistants work 20 hours a
  week when they live in the lab, putting in 60
  hours/week+, especially on cutting-edge, potentially lucrative research, hence their stipends are usually around minimum wage).
  
  
  At minimum, universities receiving taxpayer money
  should not be permitted to prevent researchers
  who wish to release their research software as
  open source from doing so in cases where this is
  legal (that is, the software in question is not
  a derivative work of some non-open-source software).
  
  A university might still be able to recover some
  revenue by charging proprietary software developers
  for the right to incorporate the code with fewer
  restrictions, e.g. GPL for the general public,
  more permissive licensing for those willing to pay.
  

• Dual-licensed GPL/commercial is ideal here!
  2002-01-15 14:12:56  thebs [View]
  
  
  When used _effectively_ with existing copyright law, dual-licensed GPL/commercial software is the _ultimate_balance_ between freedom and commercial interests.
  
  In the case of publicly funded software development, I would grant 2 copyrights to the finished work. One would go to the organization who developed the software, the other would go to the government (or government agency/authorized organization).
  
  The first copyright could be used by the developing entity commercially. They could resell, license and/or further the development of the software commercially once the contract is completely. It was their innovation that led to the creation of the product, so they _should_ benefit. And their competitors should not be allowed to simply "take it" like typical "public domain" or "non-GPL, BSD-like" licensing allows them to do.
  
  The second copyright would be used to secure permanent GPL licensure of all development done during the government contract (again, assigned to an agency, private, non-profit org like the FSF, etc...). So the non-commercial/end-user public gains rights to the software paid with tax payer dollars. It's only fair.
  
  Regarding 3rd parties, they now have a choice in what to do after the contract is over and the software is release. They can help the public develop the GPL version for free. Or they can license the commercial version (usually for cost), by negotiating with the original contractor. The key is that there *IS* choice for both public and private entites, and that is the flexibility dual-licensed GPL/commercial brings using existing copyright law.
  
  It is important that the dual-license approach be GPL/commercial. If we use something like MPL/commercial -- where licenses like the MPL allows the commercial developer to take community developments without compensating the copyright holders of the modifications -- then the original developer/contractor could "leech" on post-contract developments by the public. The idea is that once the contract is over, the commercial organization no longer gets "free development" from the public ([funds], in the case of the original contract), but has to negotiate any new GPL-licensed developments after the contract's expiration back into the commercial version [at their cost].
  
  
  

• It won't work
  2002-01-15 14:01:17  epepke [View]
  
  
  Sorry.
  
  I was a research scientist at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute for 13 years. My biggest project at that time I released open source. So, I'm in favor of it, and I think it's a really good idea, but the reality is that public universities never get the funding that they need, because the public expects them to make up the difference. Sometimes they have to sell things to make up the difference.
  
  I would love for universities to be funded properly. However, signing a petition demanding Open Source software is the same kind of naive thinking that people use when they vote for any politician who promises to lower taxes and don't care how this affects universities and the like, which is the reason that universities do this sort of thing.
  
  Geeks don't have any excuse to be this thinking-impaired. If you want publically funded software to be free and Open Source, agitate to increase public funding.

• The owner of the software should have full access
  2002-01-15 13:58:51  franklamonica [View]
  
  
  We need to establish who are the real owners of the software produced by people receiving government grants. There is a very well established precedent in the computer industry that requires any employee of a commercial company to sign over the rights to any intellectual property he or she creates while on company time, or when using company resources. I don't hear too much complaining about that requirement, it is almost routine in most employment contracts. People in the academic world, however, seem to view the work they do as "their own" work, yet it is paid for by my taxes. I am their employer, they should follow the clear precedent set by almost all other organizations, and turn their work over to me and the rest of the owners; we own their work because we finance their activities.
  
  The employees of the goverenment agency that bestows the grant are also MY employees, but I have tacitly given them the right to represent my interests in these matters. The license to apply to government funded software should be defined by some qualified government agency. The authority we have granted to these agencies includes the right to collect - or not collect - money or ongoing fees from any entity that wants to use the results of that work. There is no obligation on the part of the government to give away any of the intellectual property it funded; their obligation is to represent the taxpayers best interest as they view the issues. I don't want enemies of the United States to benefit from my tax dollars, so I'd rather allow the agency in charge of the grant to use their best judgement to control the release of that IP.
  
  If researchers want to use proprietary software in their projects, and if they want to use government money to pay for it, then they should go through the appropriate government agency and present their case. If they want to mix work from private and government funding, then they have the obligation to keep the intellectual property separated by owner unless the government agency that funded their project sees fit to allow them to grant private entities beneficial access to that IP. We are a representative democracy, and we need to have faith in the organizations we put in place to administer our affairs.
  Frank LaMonica

• How about a Grandfather clause for current closed source?
  2002-01-15 13:50:05  akvalentine [View]
  
  
  > The easiest way to do that is to get the DSSP
  > source code and make the needed changes. The new
  > code almost certainly contains parts of the old
  > code, so under the DSSP license it cannot be
  > redistributed. This means I cannot release the
  > software under an open source license, and so I
  > cannot do this research under a publicly funded
  > grant.
  
  To work around this sort of problem, I propose a Grandfather clause that will stipulate that projects that currently depend on Closed Software may remain closed, but any newly developed software must be OSS.
  
  Just a thought. . .
  
  Anthony
  
  

• Open source is not sufficient
  2002-01-15 13:28:11  rweiler [View]
  
  
  It does little good for researchers to release their source under GPL if they also hold patents on methods that are implemented as part of that source. For this proposal to work, not only would the source need to be licensed under an Open Source license, but all of the patents would need to be placed in th e public domain as well. I do firmly belived that the taxpayer should not have to pay for every invention twice, but this propsoal doesn't really help.

• IMHO
  2002-01-15 13:26:56  namyzarc [View]
  
  
  I think that all publicly funded projects should be open sourced. However, recognizing that some of the code base may come from non-open source endevors, I believe the following pratices should be adopted.
  
  A) If NO "commercial" code exists in the project, it must be open sourced.
  
  B) If "commerical" code exists in the project, one of the following needs to happen.
  
  B1) Attempt to nogoiate a source distribution agreement with the "commercial" party.
  
  B2) Failing B1, attempt to nogoiate a binary only distribution in library/object, format. If a library/object format is not possible (ex: non-open code is part of the primary code base), see B3
  
  B3) Failing B1 and B2, there is no other recourse but to not allow open distribution of the code. This is extremely unfortunate, but unavoidable as the first two option failed.
  
  Let me first state that I think this would be a major set back. But, the only other option would be to not allow the use of any non-open code in publicly fund projects.
  
  Anyway, there is my two cents.
  
  

• Article from Glen Jacobson
  2002-01-15 12:39:48  jason_e_stewart [View]
  
  
  Glen Jacobson, president of Unique Systems, Inc, just wrote an email to the petition mailing list that folks might be interested in:
  
  http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/15460/0/
  
  jas.
  --
  Jason E. Stewart
  Co-founder Open Informatics
  Keep Publicly Funded Software Public --==*==-- www.OpenInformatics.org