Re: [Fsfe-uk] Public money and freedom

[Space Bunny]

Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:

> Labour MP Ian Gibson, who chairs the committee (House of Commons Science
> and Technology Committee) says
>
> “If research is funded by public money, then it should be available to
> the public for free,”
This prompts me to let you know it is hoped to have Richard Stallman in 
Edinburgh as a guest of Edinburgh University soemtime in 2004.

http://www.movingpages.org/MoinWiki/RichardStallman

It is interesting with universities told to be creative with there 
funding. One way is to try and lever proprietary advantage of owning 
their research. It creates this odd form of public ownership that 
overall works against the public interest. Also levering proprietary 
advantage is not guaranteed winner for pulling in money as you know from 
the case made to biz for free software.
Where it has worked to pull in money the company is usually spun off and 
uni loses control and maybe gets a fixed one off pay back.

All code that is used externally that uni claim copyright over should be 
copylefted. And uni should encourage copyleft of code, and enable 
students and researchers to copyleft code. ie help keep source readily 
available etc.

All published documents funded by public money should be copylefted in 
my view, if not public domain.
eg hansard, reports such as social trends, council newsletters etc.

Should Unis publish research in open to stop it been patented, or try to 
build a patent portfolio promising to use it like redhat says it will 
only as leverage for cross licensing. The free software movement has not 
come up with a equivalent for patents as copyleft for copyrights. I 
don't think there is one that would work well. We have to defeat patents 
politically. But in meantime what should Unis do. We should keep 
pressure on them to promise to give free licenses forever on ones they 
do own.

Dasher software is free software under gpl but I seem to remember that 
it is covered by patent, I am not sure if patent is own by uni or 
researcher himself or some other body. I tried to quickly find some info 
on website and could not.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

I may just email them and ask, and ask how they hope to use patent just 
for leverage against those who try to use patents against it and it 
allies, or for general gain for owner.

I could be wrong and it might not be patented.

Also someone from W3C is involved with hosts Edinburgh Uni and there 
outlook on things such as patents is not quite same as Stallmans. So it 
should be interesting.

cheers

Micah
http://j12.org/sb/