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Re: [LUG] UK Universities and Open Source

 

John Horne wrote:
> 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.

I hope so. The article which started this thread got me thinking- I'm 
going to Bristol in Oct to do computer science- is the university going 
to stop me from releasing my code to the open source community? Chances 
are that anything I do for coursework or whatever will be something that 
the community would benefit from. Are they even legally allowed to stop 
me releasing it?


Simon

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