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On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 20:42 +0100, Keith Abraham wrote: > > The difficulty for many institutions is that intellectual property > rights reside with the university, which can make handing over code > difficult. Different institutions have different policies - some use > employment contracts to enforce intellectual property rights. Metcalfe > said it was an issue universities must address." > > How do some universities get away with that? > I work at a Uni and have submitted new code (via sourceforge). The only requirement I had, as checked with my managers, which included our contracts person, was that the Uni was not responsible for any of the code. I included an acknowledgement that the Uni had allowed me to work on the code during their time, and that was about it. We are mainly an MS site, but I don't think the Uni has any problem with open-source code or submitting new code, so long as it doesn't reflect back on them in a bad light. The easiest way to do that was to submit it as my code and absolve the Uni of responsibility. They agreed, and I would have thought a lot of UK Uni's would do something similar. As for patches, I have submitted bug reports, bug fixes/patches, as well as suggestions etc for various bits of software. However, the bug reports/patches relate to 'our' bugs. That is, I see the bug because it is in software that we are using and it affects us. The incentive then is for me to fix it, not only for the open-source community, but for my employers. If they want the software to work then we either have to wait for someone to fix it, or I fix it myself. They accept (allow?) the latter (providing of course that I *can* fix it :-) ) Again, I suspect this may be true for other UK Uni's too. John. -- --------------------------------------------------------------- John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914 E-mail: John.Horne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fax: +44 (0)1752 233839 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html