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Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

About time! Now we just need to get rid of the rules, that the work done by the students is owned by the university..

Which for most students doesn't matter, but I know that in computer engineering a number of my friends intentionally avoided things that might have commercial significance because they wanted to keep the ideas for themselves. Getting a MS/PhD is enough of a financial ding (probably on the order of $200-$400k) that the insult of both paying the school _AND_ giving them the resulting work is just to much.

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In practice people I know who've built startups on top of tech they built at universities haven't run into problems. A common strategy is to open-source any code you might want to later use commercially, as a way of throwing it over the fence. Your startup can then use it on whatever terms you open-sourced it under (probably BSD/MIT, if you want to give your later self maximum flexibility). Granted, so can anyone else. But usually the research-prototype code itself isn't enough to build a competitor, and the common case for research code open-sourced by a grad student in some random .tar.gz code dump on their website (or worse, included as a file appendix to their thesis), is that nobody else will even so much as look at it.

The university may have to approve this, but at major CS departments approving students to open-source the code that goes with their thesis is pretty rubber-stamp, at least if it's self-contained.

What were Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina positions at the University of Illinois' NCSA when developing Mosaic? Even the name Mozilla points to the acrimony over that dispute over intellectual property.

Intellectual property generated in other fields does not benefit from this kind of liberal license loop-hole, unfortunately. We cannot open-source all applied science according to the current rules.

Areas where universities are aggressive about patenting definitely have other problems, yeah. Fortunately in CS academia, software patents are relatively uncommon. Not unheard of, but only a small percentage of non-hardware theses end up involved in a patent filing.

> About time! Now we just need to get rid of the rules, that the work done by the students is owned by the university..

If you want to start your own commercial enterprise, don't use non-profit, tax exempt equipment and facilities to do it.

But what if they paid their "student activity/ and computer fee"?

Not really relevant -- most of the computer systems used to actually carry out research are paid for with grant money of some flavor. The university computing systems are more incidental

This is why the main research building at UCSF is allegedly called Genentech Hall - a bunch of researchers ran off with IP generated at UCSF to start Genentech, and the university sued successfully and used the money to build that building.

Of course if I had my druthers none of this would be property, either the university's or the student's or the professor's. The idea of someone owning an idea is bonkers, especially when the ideas they claim to own are built on stuff you were just taught. You gilded the tip of a long chain of human creation you were lucky enough to be handed, now the world fucking owes you? It's absurdly arrogant.

You gilded the tip of [i.e., added a valuable new link to] a long chain [of valuable independent links each created by some individual or small group of individuals] of human creation that the world was lucky enough to be handed, and now the world thinks you fucking owed it that? That's absurdly arrogant.

If you create a thing in the world that did not exist before, and other people find it valuable, why should you not be able to reap some of that value? Why is the world more entitled to the thing you made, the insight you had, and the work you put in, than you are?

Because what you are trading on is 99.9% your position of privilege and 0.1% your work. I've had plenty of insights and spent my life around the smartest person in the world for decades. None of us are so great. We are handed most of what we make and turn a few bolts.

If somebody pours the foundation, somebody else frames the walls, a bunch of other people hang the drywall and run the wires and hook up the plumbing, and then I come along and lay the carpet, I'm obviously an idiot if I try to take credit for the entire house. But I certainly deserve to be paid for laying the carpet. How much work was done on the house before I got there has nothing to do with whether or not I, in my turn, spent my time and knowledge and effort to make something that was valuable too.

Incidentally, did you really mean to say that you spent your life around the smartest person in the world? If so, well, I'm skeptical but also curious who you think the smartest person in the world is.

No, I meant people. I believe people deserve to be paid because we all want to eat, live, etc., and right now this means a wage. I don't believe people deserve a patent monopoly.

If you're an employee all of your work output is work-for-hire and de jure owned by your employer. Can't have it both ways.

Speaking from academic computer science, I have never heard of anyone making the decision not to work on something for this reason--perhaps because if an idea could immediately be turned into a successful company, it's probably not good research! And most (all?) CS PhD programs (which include an MS in passing in the USA) guarantee full funding for a number of years and most successful students are funded the whole time.

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