In which Meredith gets along with people

[maradydd]

Yet another discussion with my adviser that didn't turn into a fight. I am, in a word, amazed.

(And he was even being critical this time: he pointed out a general use-case for QBE which my machine-learning library supports but my SQL syntax doesn't. So now I get to dive back into the grammar and fix that, but it won't be hard -- and it's the right time to do it, since I haven't really gotten started implementing ranking yet. So, look for that update sometime around the end of this month/beginning of next.)

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

universities wanting to choose sources of funding that give them academic freedom.

Which makes it all the more ironic that so many useful academic software projects are encumbered by totally absurd licensing schemes. (KEGG, SVM^light, I'm looking at you.)

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Well, the key insight is that they want academic freedom for themselves. They also want to profit off of whatever they (or rather, their students) develop which could possibly have profit potential.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

...while leaving students on research-assistant salaries, as opposed to giving them any IP rights in the material that wouldn't have existed without their research and work. It's happened to people in the engineering and biosciences departments here, and I doubt it's different other places.

I'm particularly irritated at KEGG because a few years ago I tried talking with them about a license to let IDT develop some tools using their data. We would have housed a copy of the DB on our own servers and provided an interface for people to use for free, like with SciTools. Never mind that a university could have used the same provision model and gotten a license for free; because we're a Big Bad Corporation, they wanted an exorbitant licensing fee.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

...while leaving students on research-assistant salaries, as opposed to giving them any IP rights in the material that wouldn't have existed without their research and work. It's happened to people in the engineering and biosciences departments here, and I doubt it's different other places.

Yep. You pretty much sign over all your IP rights when you get hired as a grad student, anywhere. If you're lucky, you'll get founders' stock in the spin-off if they recognise that they need to hire you in order for the company to be successful. Planning for this, however, means hiding key pieces of your research from the academic community. It's quite a scam.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

My answer to this so far has been to GPL everything that I think is even remotely useful.