Re: [tlug] Zurus distributions experience

[Lars Kotthoff <lists@example.com>]

> Academia has enough trouble doing anything useful.  Why use a license
> that makes it harder for innovators (ie, the profit-oriented entities
> that actually produce marketable products, rather than vaporware-
> vending "pure researchers" and "inventors") to do their thing by
> bringing the academic pie-in-the-sky down to earth?

So you're saying that basically innovation only happens when somebody has a
commercial interest in it?

I think that the primary purpose of academia is *not* to make it easy for
profit-oriented entities to market their ideas -- if that was the case we might
just as well stop doing research at universities and instead do everything in
commercial research centres.

If you came up with an innovative software product and released it under a
do-what-you-want-with-it license, anybody could continue to develop it, make it
proprietary, and sell it. This would be bad for two reasons -- 
1) any additional innovation by the profit-oriented entity would not be
   available to the research community the original innovation came from, which
   entirely defeats the point of publishing it in the first place,
2) the research that produces the innovation is often enough funded by public
   money, i.e. research grants. Having a commercial entity profit from that
   without giving anything back just seems wrong.

Note that I'm not saying that you should always use such a license. If a
profit-oriented entity wants to pay the researcher money to re-release it
under a license they like, by all means! But taking it all for nothing -- I'd
rather not.

Lars