Good catch. Academia seems like the strangest place for people to be especially possessive over the IP they produce, since the actual knowledge the produce is

Good catch. Academia seems like the strangest place for people to be especially possessive over the IP they produce, since the actual knowledge the produce is generally intended to be shared freely and used for any purpose. And yet academia seems to push for patents for their ideas (admittedly these ideas tend to be less obvious than the patents coming from industry) and non-commercial licenses for their software. I think it's time for academia to reevaluate what their purpose is, and whether sharing software and implementation details should be considered as essential as sharing ideas. I personally think that academia should use permissive licenses, since they are primarily funded by the government, and so the software should be available to all without restriction, just as scientific knowledge is. But I guess that depends on your views on software "freedom" (which I characterize as the belief in natural right to modify and copy software that one owns).