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Comment by seemslegit | Hacker News Reader

And that's great, but nowhere does it say that this something should end up as the property of a corporation who will then charge the public for its use.

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Can't enslave professors, so its part of the deal. Been happening about 1000 years. And I'm not sure I care to make Universities into profit centers (any more than they are).

Neither is what being proposed nor is a reasonable reading of the above, if Google hires out an entire group and its associated work then the university and federal research funding agencies should maintain equity in its results, many universities have programs for exactly this kind of thing.

Also afaik John Martinis maintained a paid and tenured position at UCSB during his work at Google.

Not sure how that's different at all. Hiring out === freedom of the individual. Not going to support any rule to keep University employees from going to work wherever they please.

Its the idea that the University would 'own' part of a commercial enterprise that's chilling. Means even more commercialization of Universities than at present.

It's not unusual for universities to own part of a commercial enterprise. Stanford owned a chunk of Google, IIRC. More commonly they derive revenue from licensing intellectual property.

Um hm. And its not unusual for Universities to have become commercial juggernauts run by for-profit administrators with 7-figure salaries, at the expense of faculty and students.

And yet the private sector is not impeded by "freedom of the individual" when it comes to protecting investments with NDAs, non-competes all the way to Levandowski-style criminal prosecution.

Obviously noone should be forced to stay where they don't want to be or prevented to work where they want but in this case it's about what they take and bring with them beyond their innate skills.

On top of what others have said (this is how it's intended to work), if the university saw fit to fund the research up to commercialization, or at least a patent, they would be the ones taking the profit.

You can say that about YC or any other incubator and yet they seem keen on maintaining their equity.

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