Re: [tlug] Zurus distributions experience

[Lars Kotthoff <lists@example.com>]

> Well, no, actually academics probably do as much of it as anybody.  R,
> for one example.

Point taken. That's an example for innovation happening without commercial
interest though.

> Now you tell me.  What you said before was that the GPL should be used
> for academic research results.  You didn't make any exceptions....

"I think in academia the GPL is the best license to use for *most*
things." (emphasis added)

> I don't understand what you're talking about here.  There's a very big
> difference between using a license that discourages commercial
> research into extensions and thus reserves a small portion of possible
> benefits to the academic community, and using a license that enables
> commercial exploitation, which provides benefits to a much wider
> audience (otherwise it wouldn't be worth trying to compete with the
> free version), without taking *anything* away from the academic
> community except vaporware that won't ever` be written in the presence
> of the GPL.

Point taken. It's debatable though whether the possibility of commercial
exploitation -- which isn't ruled out by releasing it under the GPL, you can
still charge for e.g. consulting -- or the potential benefits to the academic
community weigh higher. I would certainly be hesitant to say one or the other
for every case.

>  > They're paid by the general population (which includes professors
>  > and graduate students) and companies. Assuming that a particular
>  > piece of research will only benefit one or a small number of
>  > companies,
> 
> That assumption is *spectacularly* wrong.

I admit that I don't understand all the economics behind it, but are you saying
that in general a piece of research, if exploited by a company, benefits the
general public? For example a specific algorithm in Mathematica?

>  > it seems unfair that everybody else (including competitors of those
>  > companies) should essentially subsidise their R&D.
> 
> Huh?  What subsidy?  The whole point of open source software is that
> it is socially stupid to do the same R&D twice when you can do it once
> and distribute it more widely.  How is this different from the
> "subsidy" you get when I publish my research results in a journal you
> can check out from the University library for free?  Maybe I should
> make you pay me?[1]

I'm paying tuition fees for, among other things, being able to checkout books
and journals from the library. It's debatable whether this is an appropriate
amount, but it's not really like a subsidy.

My point is that everybody's taxes are paying for the research and if one
company uses it, they are benefiting from that.

> Since the academics
> are going to do it anyway (BTW, this is a fundamental assumption of
> Stallman's GNU Manifesto, except s/academic/programmer/), nothing is
> lost by using a permissive license (except maybe royalties to the
> academics, but we'll ignore that because it's just personal greed).

There's a potential loss of insight if a company continues the research and
makes it proprietary.

> Note that the commercial software firm doesn't care much about
> "stuff", it cares about money.  I'm reducing profs and grad students
> to that level, that's all.  And the amount of "stuff" that gets
> published in useful form is actually rather small.

If you're looking at it that way, having universities do research to start with
is a terrible waste. Surely the commercial exploitation and benefit to society
would be much higher if the same was done by commercial entities.

> Feel free to try to get the license on FSF-owned copyrights, or the
> Linux kernel, or OpenSSL, changed.  I don't think you can do it.

Nope, that wasn't what I was talking about though. If I release my research
software, I can change the license.

Lars