[ox] FYI Salon.com: Public money, private code
- From: Robert Gehring <zoroaster snafu.de>
- Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 15:33:08 +0000
It's a strange world, where private held companies like IBM give their code
to the open source community whereas public universities start to keep the
code -written with support from public money- private, isn't it?
-->
"Public money, private code
The drive to license academic research for profit is stifling the spread of
software that could be of universal benefit.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jeffrey Benner
Jan. 4, 2002 | Would the creation of the Internet be allowed to happen today?
The networked society we live in is in large part a gift from the University
of California to the world. In the 1980s, computer scientists at Berkeley
working under contract for the Defense Department created an improved version
of the Unix operating system, complete with a networking protocol called the
TCP/IP stack. Available for a nominal fee, the operating system and network
protocol grew popular with universities and became the standard for the
military's Arpanet computer network. In 1992, Berkeley released its version
of Unix and TCP/IP to the public as open-source code, and the combination
quickly became the backbone of a network so vast that people started to call
it, simply, "the Internet."
Many would regard giving the Internet to the world as a benevolent act
fitting for one of the world's great public universities. But Bill Hoskins,
who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced
at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the
code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he
says.
Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be,
Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the
rights to a corporation and collected a royalty for the U.C. Regents on
Internet usage years into the future. It is the kind of deal his department,
the Office of Technology Licensing, cuts all the time.
Hoskins' "privatize it" attitude has become the norm among administrators at
many universities and federal labs across the country. As a result,
computer-science professors and researchers who want to release their work to
the public as open-source software often face an uphill battle.
[...]"
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/01/04/university_open_source/print.html
Gruß, Robert
--
Von/From: Dipl.-Inform. Robert Gehring
E-Mail: rag cs.tu-berlin.de
privat: zoroaster snafu.de
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