I was wrong (part 2)
liorpachter.wordpress.com
liorpachter.wordpress.com
Speaking as someone who sits in industry now, I have found it almost impossible to successfully conclude negotiations between not-very-interested academics who don't really understand how licensing works (and the staff who supposedly help them) and a big, paranoid company.
When you put some rando commercial license or complicated terms on your (likely tax-payer funded) data or software, what it essentially requires from big companies is a extremely expensive legal review to see what we would be signing up for. This review might be considerably more expensive than the amount being asked for the data/software. What's more, if a small company signs up for this, and ever wants to be acquired by a big company, the review may not happen (small companies and startups are usually more relaxed about this stuff) but will have to take place during acquisition.
Bonus points for when the academics or their representatives wander away mid-discussion.
As a final bonus, I have seen our commercial competitors in this area just essentially fund university researchers to do thinly veiled advertising by accessing the same dataset for an "academic" paper. Meanwhile I sit on my hands respecting "the latter and spirit" of the law.
Some new, standardized, industry accepted commercial license (who will invest the required legal effort to come up with such a license that's accepted by both sides?)? A concept based on voluntary donations (good luck getting that by the finance department)?
I don't get why you'd expect academic institutions to offer you permissive licenses though, when in all likelihood you have your own complicated partnership/IP/licensing processes for industry partners. Why is it ok for them but not for you?
And what difference does it make that their research is tax-payer funded? That doesn't make it free. That means that the institute has an obligation to make returns and, academic research being somewhat open, lock down IP rights with certainty.
> I believed then, and still do now, that it’s right that institutions that support software development should benefit from its commercial use (UC Berkeley receives 2/3 of the royalties for commercially licensed products), that students are entitled to renumeration for software engineering work that does not directly support of their own research goals, and that funds are needed to support specialized personnel who can maintain/improve code and service user requests.
Also i believe, most students in academia are under-paid.
And I too wish that the Facebook-of-the-future don't go down this road. Number two on devs wishlist should be transparency about exactly which patents cover the code at hand. IMHO.
I draw the analogy due to the similarities of "open source" and government funded findings. Another area where these issues arise is charitable contributions that come with strings attached (like naming a building or agreeing to continue a certain program).
People like getting full recognition for the act of generosity without the cost of their strings being acknowledged or subtracted from the total.
(1) The reality of Facebook is that it's unlikely to ever be an issue, but if the arrangement becomes more commonplace the open source community could become a minefield of unquantifiable risks. I realize this is a slippery-slope argument and is thus easy to overstate.
In the same way that some researchers wont use software which doesn't have permissive licenses, some companies wont use software which does.
I don't get it. I also don't get why you expected license agreements to be signed and completed in a single day by commercial entities. You couldn't sign and complete a 5 minute coffee date with most company's IP staff within a single day, nevermind have licensing arrangements agreed upon.
However, while I have used MIT/BSD-style licenses in the past, I can no longer recommend them, as they potentially open up software users to malicious submarine patent attacks. That is, a contributor can intentionally contribute code that (purports to) read on a (not-even-issued-yet) patent, and then later threaten to sue users of the software.
That's why I instead recommend Apache-2.0. My arguments are more fully described here: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/
Fast forward to two different Bay area universities and it was a completely different experience. Open source licenses were agreed upon over a quick email.
edit: my thesis is cc-by licensed.
some students may choose to request an embargo on their thesis, in those cases where their thesis work will be published elsewhere (in a peer reviewed journal, usually), or if their thesis would constitute disclosure of something for which a patent application is underway.
my thesis was boring enough to avoid those cases.
Because it's going to wind up in the library archives (and proquest) for ever and ever, the university is quite strict about formatting. I checked about 6 months ahead of time to make sure that replacing the (C) symbol with the (CC) symbol on the copyright page wasn't going to cause any issues. If a thesis is not properly submitted to proquest, you don't graduate, so... wanted to tick that box off pretty early.
It's based on data and research often paid for by the university, and includes the work of many different people. indirectly: advisors, lab partners, professors, other students. Directly: Co-authors of papers, research assistants, and other contributors.
It's a messy bundle of work.
Edit: GPL and ASL have explicit patent clauses (obviously only applies to patents the software licensor has authority to license).
12. License ===========
This is a release version. Permission is granted for the normal use of the program and its output in an academic setting, including in publications. If the program is used to generate data for a publication, please cite this paper:
G. Lunter and M. Goodson. Stampy: A statistical algorithm for sensitive and fast mapping of Illumina sequence reads. Genome Res. 2011 21:936-939.
The program itself may not be modified in any way, and may not be reverse-engineered.
This license does not allow the use of this program for any commercial purpose. If you wish to use this program for commercial purposes, please contact the author.
No guarantees are given as to the program's correctness, or the accuracy or completeness of its output. The author accepts no liability for damage or otherwise following from using and interpreting the output of this program. The software is supplied "as is", without obligation by the author to provide any services or support.
The blog author just wrote another post which was essentially a hatchet job on a 'rival' software package. One of the major differences between his software kallisto and the rival Salmon was the license - Salmon has a GNU General Public License.
[1] https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/pachters-p-valu...
I do get what you're saying but I think people discuss positive things all the time on even the worst sites. Admitting you're wrong isn't all that novel, but the changing of license is.