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Comment by dude01 | Hacker News Reader

How much evidence of a bubble do we need? When even universities get into the incubator business...

Universities have always been in the incubator business. The bubble actually forces universities to be more transparent about their IP licensing policies. Do read how Netscape was rewritten due to licensing issues. There is a reason why UIUC gets a bad rep. If anything this is good side effect of bubble, since it forces universities to re-examine their licensing practises and invent new IP models that distinguish between software and medical drug/device inventions.

" University of Illinois v. Andreessen (1994) - The web revolution began at the University of Illinois with the first graphics based browser, Mosaic, but few are aware of its history. The open source code which spawned both Netscape and Internet Explorer was created by graduate students using open source code. The university sued the students for trademark infringement in an attempt to capture royalties even though the source code was available for free on the web. The developers offered the university shares in the newly launched Netscape which would have netted UL over $8 million. Instead, the university chose a prolonged legal battle which was settled for $2.7 million, bankrupted Netscape, allowed Microsoft Explorer to capture the browser market and left University of Illinois out of the legacy of the innovation. "

http://www.ipadvocate.org/forum/dispute.cfm?Type=Disputes

http://markvillacampa.com/2014/01/13/the-day-i-learned-about...

I'm still having trouble nailing down the timeline on this, but it seems like, at some point there were two companies, both with access to the mosaic source and both rebuilding it from scratch. One of those companies had licensed it, the other hadn't. Obviously there's more to it than that, but in 1994, I can see how this would look to lawyers.

That said, I think public university research should all be public domain so we avoid this entirely, but there's a whole waterfall of other problems that come with that.

Also, as a graduate of UIUC, I'm curious about this bad rep. I know their entrepreneurship initiatives are pretty dismal but I still don't understand why that's a uni's job. All the cs/engineers that graduated when I did went straight into great jobs.

Netscape didn't want to pay the fee, Spyglass did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.

They also licensed it to Spyglass, who did pay the fee and who ultimately licensed it to Microsoft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.

As a society, it seems like we are moving towards smaller and efficient businesses rather than a single monstrous business entity with many divisions taking care of everything in the world. Even big companies (seem to) find it efficient to invest in bunch of startups rather than building everything in house (see Microsoft/Google/Intel VCs). Just like Universities adapted their curriculum to make students ready to take jobs in industry, now they are evolving to help students start their own business. It's just a natural progression. I totally expect every University in the world to start their own incubator, and we might see a day when graduation might mean something totally different.

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