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Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

This is a really easily solved legal issue. You draft up a quick little IP agreement that clarifies the desired state of affairs - problem solved. Resignation was not required, needed, and arguably made the legal risk worse.

Oh well.

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UW C4C would likely get involved with such an agreement and pitch a fit, UW can be a vicious beast. They don't care about the community around them, beyond what will make UW $$$ or make UW seem more like an Ivy League. This recent dispute is illuminating: https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/workers-protest-uw-laundr...

Another thing I've seen go down was UWave.fm got a LP-FM license from the FCC, had a tower site and was lined up to set up a radio station at UW's Bothell campus, and the board decided to sit on the FCC approval till the very last day before the FCC needed hard dates on tower build and frequency use timelines, only to tell this student group that UW was canning the whole thing (despite it not costing UW a dime).

I've worked with plenty of patent licensing and tech transfer offices at universities. This isn't a situation where they'd pitch a fit. Worst case scenario, they need an email from a dept head directing them to get it dealt with.

Your average legal dept is overly conservative, not brain-dead.

I think OP thought navigating office politics to accomplish what you describe would be quite troublesome, and they would rather bank on the current department chair keeping C4C from taking action after they leave, rather than fight for basic rights inside UW.

UW is not kind to their employees: https://www.usatoday.com/story/college/2015/04/23/4000-uw-st...

I've spent a lot of time on exactly this sort of thing over the years, with very strong support from the math department. There are an enormous number of rules (laid out at Executive Orders like this: http://www.washington.edu/admin/rules/policies/PO/EO57.html), and the university works within the framework of all of those rules. So even if everybody agrees that it would be far make the most sense to do X, if the rules explicitly say "you can't do X", then you don't get to do X. It's very different than how things work in a small company (say), or maybe a smaller private university. UW is a massive (and old) state university, and isn't so flexible. For example, when I asked about being appointed at less than 50% time, we discovered here (https://ap.washington.edu/ahr/academic-titles-ranks/professo...) "Must be appointed at a minimum of 50%.", and that's that.

FWIW, I think the title for your piece is doing you no favors. Titles are hard, so that's not intended as some zinger. I think it just set up a lot of people to think "Must be some flake that he would ask the internet to decide this hugely important personal thing for him!"

I only skimmed the article to try to determine if you were, in fact, asking the internet to help you decide. I got to the announcement that you had decisively decided and went "Meh, could use a better title."

Best of luck in your future endeavors, from an internet stranger who had never heard of you before today.

You're right -- it's a bad title, and your constructive criticism is appreciated.

It wasn't actually intended as constructive criticism per se. Just observation concerning some of the replies I'm seeing posted on HN, which strike me as being influenced by the title rather than rooted in the obvious fact that you've had years to think about this and know what you are doing.

There are quite a few professors I've run into at Seattle Central and North Seattle College that have formerly taught at UW Seattle, but left due to situations like what you describe (dept is fully supportive of X happening, but due to an age old rule it will never happen).

UW has a ton of baggage and is quite inflexible compared to other institutions in the region and state, their lack of flexibility is enabled by having the highest tuition in the area ($11k vs $4k per year) and significantly higher state subsidies (UW, WSU, etc taking 60% of the state's college budget, yet only educating 40% of the students) than 2 year institutions.

This underfunding of 2 year institutions in favor of UW and ilk was what triggered the walkout yesterday and the ongoing protests: http://www.thestand.org/2019/04/join-aft-members-april-16-wa...

You assume they would sign it. That quick little agreement is likely to be a major point of contention.

UW has tried overall to be as supportive as they can be within the parameters of Washington State law and University rules. I did get UW to sign something a few years ago, but it was clear that whatever work I did on CoCalc had to be on my own time, not using any UW resources. There's much more to why I resigned than just my fear of potential IP issues (note: the issues are not worse by resigning, because I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years, starting with a BSD-licensed codebase). An additional factor, which I didn't explain well, is that I would have to devote at least 50% time (so 20 hours a week) to work for UW, and this work would not be on CoCalc. Unfortunately, I have found that I am unable to do a good job working on CoCalc, if I have to spend 20 hours a week focused on other things. It's also impossible for me to respond to critical customer needs, server issues, etc., if I'm preparing to teach (or actually teaching) or in a committee meeting. For example, imagine that a 500-person course at UCLA has an exam coming up using CoCalc, and there is some issue with pushing out the exam to students, which I could easily fix if I could focus on it. I would feel terrible ignoring the UCLA course for a committee meeting or because I was teaching.

This makes a lot more sense, Prof. Stein. Best wishes in your continuing quest :).

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