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I was wrong (part 2)
- hprotagonist 9y agoI've been about half a block down this road. Thank God, the university office determined it wasn't worth the universities time to invite the lawyers -- and my project is happily open source.
- mbreese 9y agoOne of my least favorite experiences in grad school was dealing with our school's tech transfer office. They fought hard to avoid using the GPL for licensing anything. Just getting them to agree that a simple (to be published) tool should have an open source license was difficult. (And took many meetings) Fast forward to two different Bay area universities and it was a completely different experience. Open source licenses were agreed upon over a quick email.
- hprotagonist 9y agoI had a fun time with the library copyright office. 6 months before my thesis defense I emailed them with "hi what's policy and procedure for creative commons licenses on theses". Nobody had ever asked before... edit: my thesis is cc-by licensed.
- ensignavenger 9y agoIs it traditional for students to sign away copyright to their thesis to the University? That seems outrageous to me, but perhaps I am missing something?
- hprotagonist 9y agotraditionally you register a personal copyright. it's implicit if you register nothing. some students may choose to request an embargo on their thesis, in those cases where their thesis work will be published elsewhere (in a peer reviewed journal, usually), or if their thesis would constitute disclosure of something for which a patent application is underway. my thesis was boring enough to avoid those cases.
- ensignavenger 9y agoIf you retained the copyright personally, why would you need permission from the university to publish your work under a creative commons license? Was it just a courtesy email to let them know your plans?
- horsawlarway 9y agoI can't speak for OP, but in my experience it's very rare for a thesis to be just your work. It's based on data and research often paid for by the university, and includes the work of many different people. indirectly: advisors, lab partners, professors, other students. Directly: Co-authors of papers, research assistants, and other contributors. It's a messy bundle of work.
- ensignavenger 9y agoBut copyright isn't based on ideas and doesn't cover raw data/facts- it covers the expression of those ideas and the compilation of the data.
- hprotagonist 9y agoIt was a courtesy, and also a formatting question. Because it's going to wind up in the library archives (and proquest) for ever and ever, the university is quite strict about formatting. I checked about 6 months ahead of time to make sure that replacing the (C) symbol with the (CC) symbol on the copyright page wasn't going to cause any issues. If a thesis is not properly submitted to proquest, you don't graduate, so... wanted to tick that box off pretty early.
- SyneRyder 9y agoOne of the reasons I never continued on to do an Honours degree is because the University would have retained the copyright in my work, and the rights to license it commercially. I thought it was outrageous as well. But that was over 15 years ago, so maybe the situation has changed since.
- maccard 9y agoLucky you, I signed over a document assigning copyright to my university I believe. :sad face:
- dsjoerg 9y agoThanks for sharing your painful journey!
- adenadel 9y agoI can't take credit, I just follow Lior's blog :)
- glangdale 9y agoGood to see this change, but I wish people wouldn't go down this road to begin with. Speaking as someone who sits in industry now, I have found it almost impossible to successfully conclude negotiations between not-very-interested academics who don't really understand how licensing works (and the staff who supposedly help them) and a big, paranoid company. When you put some rando commercial license or complicated terms on your (likely tax-payer funded) data or software, what it essentially requires from big companies is a extremely expensive legal review to see what we would be signing up for. This review might be considerably more expensive than the amount being asked for the data/software. What's more, if a small company signs up for this, and ever wants to be acquired by a big company, the review may not happen (small companies and startups are usually more relaxed about this stuff) but will have to take place during acquisition. Bonus points for when the academics or their representatives wander away mid-discussion. As a final bonus, I have seen our commercial competitors in this area just essentially fund university researchers to do thinly veiled advertising by accessing the same dataset for an "academic" paper. Meanwhile I sit on my hands respecting "the latter and spirit" of the law.
- glangdale 9y agooops "the letter and spirit" of the law.
- anjc 9y agoWhat are these not-very-interested academics expecting? For you to agree to whatever commercial license or...? I don't get why you'd expect academic institutions to offer you permissive licenses though, when in all likelihood you have your own complicated partnership/IP/licensing processes for industry partners. Why is it ok for them but not for you? And what difference does it make that their research is tax-payer funded? That doesn't make it free. That means that the institute has an obligation to make returns and, academic research being somewhat open, lock down IP rights with certainty.
- folli 9y agoAs someone also on the industry side of things, what would be your recommended solution to the problem? On the one hand we don't want the legal mess that licensing entails, on the other hand I'm absolutely in favor of reimbursing the academics in some way. But how? Some new, standardized, industry accepted commercial license (who will invest the required legal effort to come up with such a license that's accepted by both sides?)? A concept based on voluntary donations (good luck getting that by the finance department)?
- drefgert 9y agoThere won't be too many comments on this post cause the internet ain't interested when someone says they are wrong. The internet wants to TELL them they are wrong, when they think they're right.
- csydas 9y agoI'm not sure that's so true. Everyone enjoys a good argument over what license the author should have used. ) I do get what you're saying but I think people discuss positive things all the time on even the worst sites. Admitting you're wrong isn't all that novel, but the changing of license is.
- drefgert 9y agoSo you're saying I'm wrong?
- anjc 9y agoI don't understand why you think you were wrong, based on the article. Surely it depends upon your objectives. If your goal is for researchers to use the software then one license might be preferable, if your goal is commercialisation then another license might be. In the same way that some researchers wont use software which doesn't have permissive licenses, some companies wont use software which does. I don't get it. I also don't get why you expected license agreements to be signed and completed in a single day by commercial entities. You couldn't sign and complete a 5 minute coffee date with most company's IP staff within a single day, nevermind have licensing arrangements agreed upon.
- ubernostrum 9y agoThe wrongness I read from it is a certain level of arrogance, that there can't really be anything too complex in licensing and copyright issues, and all those lawyers just must be posturing or engaging in pointless make-work. The discovery that well-understood standard license terms are preferred for a reason, and that there are very real issues lurking in non-standard license agreements, and corresponding realization that maybe all the people saying "you're wrong" had a point... is a step toward correcting that arrogance.
- anjc 9y agoThat makes total sense but it sounds as if his realisation tended towards open licenses being preferable in all academic scenarios, due to a now-more firmly held belief that lawyers etc are a waste of time. This obviously isn't a rule which applies generally, and I'm not sure why it even applies here when his goal was to commercialise, not to please researchers.
- dm319 9y agoHere's the license for stampy, a popular read aligner from Oxford: 12. License =========== This is a release version. Permission is granted for the normal use of the program and its output in an academic setting, including in publications. If the program is used to generate data for a publication, please cite this paper: G. Lunter and M. Goodson. Stampy: A statistical algorithm for sensitive and fast mapping of Illumina sequence reads. Genome Res. 2011 21:936-939. The program itself may not be modified in any way, and may not be reverse-engineered. This license does not allow the use of this program for any commercial purpose. If you wish to use this program for commercial purposes, please contact the author. No guarantees are given as to the program's correctness, or the accuracy or completeness of its output. The author accepts no liability for damage or otherwise following from using and interpreting the output of this program. The software is supplied "as is", without obligation by the author to provide any services or support. http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/~gerton/README.txt http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/~gerton/README.txt
- Gatsky 9y agoSome context: The blog author just wrote another post which was essentially a hatchet job on a 'rival' software package. One of the major differences between his software kallisto and the rival Salmon was the license - Salmon has a GNU General Public License.
- dm319 9y ago'I was wrong' part 1 was a really a discussion about how wrong / fraudulent some authors were who published in Nature in 2004. It looks like it turned into a bit of flame-fest[1], with the original authors chipping in. [1] https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/pachters-p-value-prize/#comment-4436 https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/pachters-p-valu...
- Gatsky 9y agoNo I mean this blog post: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perform-a-differential-expression-analysis-or-science/ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perf...
- sevensor 9y agoI was an onlooker -- for four months -- as a university IP office struggled to license source code developed at the university, to one of its own researchers. When the drama was concluded, the IP office couldn't find the source code.
- dankohn1 9y agoI'd like to commend the author for realizing that a commercial license was not achieving the goals he had for his software and being willing to own up publicly about why and how he changed directions. However, while I have used MIT/BSD-style licenses in the past, I can no longer recommend them, as they potentially open up software users to malicious submarine patent attacks. That is, a contributor can intentionally contribute code that (purports to) read on a (not-even-issued-yet) patent, and then later threaten to sue users of the software. That's why I instead recommend Apache-2.0. My arguments are more fully described here: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/
- nnutter 9y agoBSD does not have a patent license clause so if Lior, et al. have a patent on any part of the algorithm then won’t commercial use will still be ambiguous? And even if they don’t it could still be using (infringing) on a patent of a third party. Basically software patents make using any software a risk but possibly more so when you’re using something based on novel ideas. Edit: GPL and ASL have explicit patent clauses (obviously only applies to patents the software licensor has authority to license).