Hacker News Reader

Comment by seemslegit | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com