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Comment by _emacsomancer_ | Hacker News Reader

I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity (like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being completely outside of my work at the University and so therefore theoretically outside of their purview. I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.

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Come to Sweden then :) As a researcher you explicitly own the rights to any foreground, i.e. results, as stated by law — the so called teacher’s excemption.

Careful, this might only apply to professors, not the rest of the staff.

Might be, but in general the attitude and laws surrounding ownership of code (and most anything else) is very different in Norway, and I would assume Sweden. Here anything you make is explicitly yours and you have full ownership over it, even if you made it on company time. I've talked to several larger IT firms in Norway about this and they all have said that it would be suicide to force their employees to sign away their rights to personal and side projects, but that it would also more or less be impossible to enforce.

If this is indeed true it is a killer argument for moving to sweden.

If you have a job for me, I'm happy to. :)

Europe also more generally has much higher salaries for postdocs and grad students from what I've seen floating around listservs.

> I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.

All large organizations have a decent amount of bureaucracy around copyright and IP, but the difference is good ones make it easy and straightforward for employees to go through that process.

Google, for example, has a well-documented and clear process for contributing to open source software (both in work hours and in personal time): https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/

Wait, so your university owns copyright on all your work by default?! That's a bummer if true. Outrageous, actually.

I think this is US specific.

The rules vary by school and state and whether the contributions used school resources or were created as coursework.

Nope, Its the same in Germany too.

Only if it is directly related to your research under office hours and is done solely by your university. If you use the university laptop to do some OS at home it is not, though in the US it could be and usually is.

My contract requires that anything I develop using University resources, which in practice means potentially anything in my areas of specialisation, the University has some claim on.

It's not entirely unreasonable - imagine someone in Biochemistry developing some drug using University labs etc. and then turning around and selling the formula to a private lab.

But it's the petty bureaucratisation which is infuriating. (And usually the people making the decisions aren't practically qualified.)

If you use any (and I mean any) school funded resources for any of your personal projects, yes, they usually have a basis for a claim.

I have a friend who went to Utah for his bachelor's in CS.

I'm not in CS, but my understanding is that the CS dept has a historical relation with the FSF.

While I was working as an assistant researcher three years ago, my contract also considered all research-derived knowledge uni property. In this case, pretty much anything tangentially related to HTTP performance enhancements would have been claimable by them.

It the software is GPL, and you use it for your company/university to do work with, that is a very dubious claim and more likely falsifiable in court.

GPL is a license applied to a work by the copyright owner after (or at the time of) creation. It has nothing to do with authorship of the work and who owns the copyright.

To elaborate, even if GP developed code as part of a GPL project, the copyright owner could prevent him/her from distributing that code to anyone else, whether that distribution occurs under the GPL or any other license.

Well, that is the result we got from turning Universities from public knowledge centers into private for profit IP accumulating businesses.

It's the standard in many universities and many countries that consider the university your employer if you have a full time equivalent dedication, even if the university only considers you under some kind of stipend or scholarship.

And yes, it's outrageous.

It's actually the norm in the U.S. ...

I totally understand that large organisations don't want to sign papers about things that are none of their business. It's ridiculous that they need to sign them. This shouldn't be a requirement for Open Source contributions. But with some businesses claiming their employees' unrelated work done in their free time, I can see how this has become a necessity.

It's harmful for open source, and a terrible situation that's not to anyone's benefit. I guess US law should make more clear that employers don't own their employees' private work?

Totally agreed.

I always imagined it stems from historical experiences where staff ran off with ideas that they were paid to have within the scope of their employment. So perhaps this is the only way employers have thought of protecting themselves against that. Ie., what other way do we have to offer them?

It's not only owning the outcome that is the problem, if you develop a software system that in any ways competes with your employer they may have a reason to fire and/or sue you.

The problem as someone else stated above in this discussion is that with a company the size of IBM it is hard to do anything that is guaranteed not to compete with anything they do.

What if you would just publish your code on GitHub, would they seek to punish you?

If it's their code by employment contract, they could.

I doubt it, but that's not the issue. The issue is that the FSF wants a signed "ok" from the University that I can assign copyright to the FSF, and the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization won't issue that. I'll wait a year or two until I'm (hopefully) tenured and then press the issue again.

If I were sure it's ok and the university/company is not going to be mad at me I would just publish my code as public domain and let whoever can make use of it decide on themselves. Perhaps some FSF-approved developer would pick the code up if it is useful to them.

In some courses publishing coursework on GitHub can break academic integrity rules related to plagiarism. It’s hurt students as more hiring processes assume portfolios. CS departments are behind the times.

Posting your coursework on a publicly available forum is clearly academic dishonesty, what are you talking about?

Am i taking crazy pills? How is publishing your work in any way dishonest?

For a lot of those courses there's pretty much one way to solve the coursework, so all solutions are pretty similar. It's practically impossible to tell the difference between an original solution and a copied solution with the variables renamed and some code moved around. Or the student can look at the solution and reimplement it themselves, without solving it on their own. Sharing solutions can even get you expelled in many unis.

I'm going to suggest that it's on the universities to find a way around that problem. It's a real problem, but everything being publicly available online is how the world is now. Just varying assignments every year should be enough. If reasonable variations don't make the assignments challenging enough? Well the students are always going to be able to find some reasonable variation online. Starting from absolute scratch is just not a thing anymore in most fields.

They have found a way around that problem...they expel students who share solutions.

It should be on a student to choose whether or not do they want a challenge, what particular aspect and what degree they'd like to be challenged in. The job of an educational institution is to educate, whoever interested can easily invent a challenge for themselves or use an old challenge without looking at ready solutions if they so desire. Forced artificial challenge policy is questionable.

I think we're taking the same pills.

It appears that this is one of those issues that polarizes people very strongly into one of two possible options. My response to the complaints above is usually "tough luck", because I do not see it as my task to ensure that other people cannot cheat. In fact, with today's availability information, I'm certain all those that want to cheat can and will do so easily, no matter what.

This leads me to the conclusion that the fundamental problem is actually the conflation of two very different purposes which are often at odds: teaching and certification. Universities try to do both and it often ends very badly. Certification should be removed from universities and put into separate, specialized organizations.

This is also a major obstacle towards open science, and one that the open science community seems generally unaware of. Every day there seems to be another journal article extolling the virtues of data-sharing and imploring other researchers to share, but very few folks seem to treat the elephant in the room, which is that universities have no motivation to allow their researchers to release data for free and potentially relinquish valuable IP.

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