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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 -- 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