Comment by _emacsomancer_
7 years ago
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$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.
Come to Sweden then :) As a researcher you explicitly own the rights to any foreground, i.e. results, as stated by law — the so called teacher’s excemption.
Careful, this might only apply to professors, not the rest of the staff.
Might be, but in general the attitude and laws surrounding ownership of code (and most anything else) is very different in Norway, and I would assume Sweden. Here anything you make is explicitly yours and you have full ownership over it, even if you made it on company time. I've talked to several larger IT firms in Norway about this and they all have said that it would be suicide to force their employees to sign away their rights to personal and side projects, but that it would also more or less be impossible to enforce.
If this is indeed true it is a killer argument for moving to sweden.
Europe also more generally has much higher salaries for postdocs and grad students from what I've seen floating around listservs.
If you have a job for me, I'm happy to. :)
> I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/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.
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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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It's actually the norm in the U.S. ...
It is the same in the UK. You don't own any of the code made for university assignments.
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?
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.
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?
What if you would just publish your code on GitHub, would they seek to punish you?
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?
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If it's their code by employment contract, they could.
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.