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It's massively strange that this was closed source while at a public university, and open source under a public company.

brudgers 10y ago
US universities have entire departments devoted to technology licensing. The default to secrecy may be an artifact of their historic reliance on defense agency funding for technical projects and the bureaucratic staffing for paperwork heavy processes. On the other hand, there's an intellectual idea that for many companies, existing software should perhaps be seen as a liability in double entry accounting due to it's need for ongoing maintenance, upgrades, potential for catastrophic failure, and the cost associated with alterations for new business processes. Companies offload some of those costs by open sourcing and allowing developers to happily "give back" to their bottom line.
- jordigh 10y ago
  Can you explain that a bit more? How does a company offload costs by freeing their software? Surely they're not expecting to rely on public contributions to reduce maintenance costs, are they?
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Even at its most basic, an arbitrary developer filing a bug report is potentially less costly to handle than a customer experiencing a failure...it can be ignored and maybe the developer submits a patch. On a longer timeline, hiring developers experienced in the technology from the open source community saves on the cost of training them for a proprietary code base. Ideally, the open source community develops new features, identifies and patchs bugs, writes tests and libraries, etc. adding value realized by the company's paying customers. In the meantime the company still can devote staff to its business priorities and ignore those of the larger community: e.g. no `map` in go-lang and no `react new myapp` at the CLI for React. To put it another way, why would a business open source code for anything other than business reasons?
_delirium 10y ago
It wasn't quite developed at Indiana University. It's based on research that was done at Indiana University, but the actual development was done by a spinoff company, Cadence Research Systems. Vaguely similar arrangement to how the original Google was "developed at Stanford" in the loose sense of being based on research the founders did while at Stanford, but it was owned by a spinoff company.
longwaydown 10y ago
It actually predates Dybvig's time at Indiana; he started writing it as part of his PhD work at UNC Chapel Hill. Plus, he set up Cadence Research Systems for licensing Chez Scheme, so it was never owned by any university. The part where Cisco open sourced it is a bit unusual, but it's not uncommon for people to close source and sell systems they create during college or grad school and continue to use them in research.

brudgers 10y ago

US universities have entire departments devoted to technology licensing. The default to secrecy may be an artifact of their historic reliance on defense agency funding for technical projects and the bureaucratic staffing for paperwork heavy processes. On the other hand, there's an intellectual idea that for many companies, existing software should perhaps be seen as a liability in double entry accounting due to it's need for ongoing maintenance, upgrades, potential for catastrophic failure, and the cost associated with alterations for new business processes. Companies offload some of those costs by open sourcing and allowing developers to happily "give back" to their bottom line.

jordigh 10y ago
Can you explain that a bit more? How does a company offload costs by freeing their software? Surely they're not expecting to rely on public contributions to reduce maintenance costs, are they?
- brudgers 10y ago
  Even at its most basic, an arbitrary developer filing a bug report is potentially less costly to handle than a customer experiencing a failure...it can be ignored and maybe the developer submits a patch. On a longer timeline, hiring developers experienced in the technology from the open source community saves on the cost of training them for a proprietary code base. Ideally, the open source community develops new features, identifies and patchs bugs, writes tests and libraries, etc. adding value realized by the company's paying customers. In the meantime the company still can devote staff to its business priorities and ignore those of the larger community: e.g. no `map` in go-lang and no `react new myapp` at the CLI for React. To put it another way, why would a business open source code for anything other than business reasons?

_delirium 10y ago

It wasn't quite developed at Indiana University. It's based on research that was done at Indiana University, but the actual development was done by a spinoff company, Cadence Research Systems. Vaguely similar arrangement to how the original Google was "developed at Stanford" in the loose sense of being based on research the founders did while at Stanford, but it was owned by a spinoff company.

longwaydown 10y ago

It actually predates Dybvig's time at Indiana; he started writing it as part of his PhD work at UNC Chapel Hill. Plus, he set up Cadence Research Systems for licensing Chez Scheme, so it was never owned by any university. The part where Cisco open sourced it is a bit unusual, but it's not uncommon for people to close source and sell systems they create during college or grad school and continue to use them in research.