Re: [tlug] Zurus distributions experience

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Lars Kotthoff writes:

 > > 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?

Yes.  Economically, that's more or less the characterization of
innovation, because turning something into a product usable by a large
number of people is deadly dull, painstaking, hard work.  Nothing that
the academics who actually do basic research are interested in.  I'm
not going to belabor the point, but you misuse the term "innovation"
throughout to mean "invention".[1]

 > 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.

Don't be silly.  People do basic research for love, not money, and
there is precious little money in basic research, except for "public"
support.  OTOH, the developers in commercial research labs by and
large have neither the free time, the talents, nor the inclination to
do basic research.  This is not an accident, this is specialization.

 > If you came up with an innovative software product
 > and released it under a do-what-you-want-with-it license,

Amazingly enough, that's exactly what X.org, the BSDs, Apache, Python,
Perl, inter alia do (not to mention CERN and NCSA).  And you know
what?  Those guys actually act like professional developers, keeping
track of bugs and even fixing them.  For free.

BTW, the BSD and MIT/X Consortium licenses were written with the
advice of some of the best lawyers in the business.  Do you really
think that U.C. and MIT didn't know what they were doing?

 > anybody could continue to develop it, make it proprietary, and sell
 > it. This would be bad for two reasons --

Only two?  Any profitable product would undoubtedly be able to come up
with somewhere between 10 and 100 million reasons why it's good.  Ie,
at least reason one per customer. :-)

 > 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,

That may be true from the selfish point of view of the academic, and
that point of view is indeed a factor to the extent it provides further
incentive to do basic research (money is known to be a relatively poor
incentive).  Basic research *is* a good thing, and it's a good idea to
provide incentives to do more of it.  Even if it means supporting
pervects like me.[2]

But another, very important purpose of publishing is to communicate
the idea to those who will actually produce an innovation available to
society.  You are entirely neglecting that fact, which is enshrined in
the U.S. Constitution, no less.  That is something that academics are
notoriously bad at compared to overlawyered corporations that give
their executives golden parachutes.  Let alone SMEs.  So ignoring it
is really bad manners considering that taxes, which fall on
corporations, workers, and customers in varying proportions, fund the
vast share of academic research.  Except for that portion which is
directly funded by corporations or foundations (which themselves
derive from corporate wealth), of course.

 > 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.

Where do you think that "public" money comes from?  Not taxes paid by
professors and graduate students!

 > 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.

But why not?  That's an awfully hypocritical position, considering
that is what the vast majority of academics do.[3]

That ain't workin', that's the way to do it,
Lemme tell you them guys ain't dumb,
Maybe get a blister on your little finger [Emacs users]
Maybe get a blister on your thumb! [kanji-using hackers]

That ain't workin', that's the way to do it,
Hacking programs on your guv'mint money
That ain't workin', that's the way to do it,
Money for nothing, BOGOMIPS for free!
    -- with royalties, or at least apologies[4], to Mark Knopfler

Why-yes-I-am-a-tenured-suck-the-public-teat-professor-myself-ly y'rs,


Footnotes: 
[1]  If you want to use them as synonyms, be my guest.  But I say
"misuse" because that is the distinction academic researchers in the
economics and sociology of innovation make.  The distinction must be
made, and even if you insist on using "innovation" to mean
"invention", the other activity of "productization and marketing" is
where the revenues are generated, and thus must not be defined out of
existence the way you do.

[2]  Hey, I actually have a working relationship with an entity named
"Aahz".  That's almost as cool as having a Kibo distance of 1, or
being addressed by name by a Nobel prizewinner.

[3]  You should also note that there are many ways to avoid
contributing back to the community under the GPL.  For example, all
you have to do to avoid contributing to GNU Emacs is to share code
with somebody who hasn't assigned their code to the FSF.  More
importantly, internal deployment does not trigger the GPL *at all*
since no distribution has taken place.  Selling enhanced GPL code to
monopolists also is pretty safe.  It's arguable that permissive
licensing actually leaves more room for corporations to contribute
because they get to choose what to contribute, rather than being stuck
with an all-or-nothing proposition as in strong copyth^H^Hleft.

[4]  This is way under the 16-lines-don't-need-an-assignment limit
pronounced by Stallman.