I was wrong (part 2)
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I was wrong (part 2)
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Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#2I've been about half a block down this road. Thank God, the university office determined it wasn't worth the universities time to invite the lawyers -- and my project is happily open source.
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#3Thanks for sharing your painful journey!
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#4Thanks for sharing your painful journey!
I can't take credit, I just follow Lior's blog :)
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#5Good to see this change, but I wish people wouldn't go down this road to begin with.
Speaking as someone who sits in industry now, I have found it almost impossible to successfully conclude negotiations between not-very-interested academics who don't really understand how licensing works (and the staff who supposedly help them) and a big, paranoid company.
When you put some rando commercial license or complicated terms on your (likely tax-payer funded) data or software, what it essentially requires from big companies is a extremely expensive legal review to see what we would be signing up for. This review might be considerably more expensive than the amount being asked for the data/software. What's more, if a small company signs up for this, and ever wants to be acquired by a big company, the review may not happen (small companies and startups are usually more relaxed about this stuff) but will have to take place during acquisition.
Bonus points for when the academics or their representatives wander away mid-discussion.
As a final bonus, I have seen our commercial competitors in this area just essentially fund university researchers to do thinly veiled advertising by accessing the same dataset for an "academic" paper. Meanwhile I sit on my hands respecting "the latter and spirit" of the law.
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#6I've been about half a block down this road. Thank God, the university office determined it wasn't worth the universities time to invite the lawyers -- and my project is happily open source.
One of my least favorite experiences in grad school was dealing with our school's tech transfer office. They fought hard to avoid using the GPL for licensing anything. Just getting them to agree that a simple (to be published) tool should have an open source license was difficult. (And took many meetings)
Fast forward to two different Bay area universities and it was a completely different experience. Open source licenses were agreed upon over a quick email.
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#7I've been about half a block down this road. Thank God, the university office determined it wasn't worth the universities time to invite the lawyers -- and my project is happily open source.
One of my least favorite experiences in grad school was dealing with our school's tech transfer office. They fought hard to avoid using the GPL for licensing anything. Just getting them to agree that a simple (to be published) tool should have an open source license was difficult. (And took many meetings) Fast forward to two different Bay area universities and it was a completely different experience. Open source lic…
I had a fun time with the library copyright office. 6 months before my thesis defense I emailed them with "hi what's policy and procedure for creative commons licenses on theses". Nobody had ever asked before...
edit: my thesis is cc-by licensed.
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#8Good to see this change, but I wish people wouldn't go down this road to begin with. Speaking as someone who sits in industry now, I have found it almost impossible to successfully conclude negotiations between not-very-interested academics who don't really understand how licensing works (and the staff who supposedly help them) and a big, paranoid company. When you put some rando commercial license or complicated ter…
oops "the letter and spirit" of the law.
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#9There won't be too many comments on this post cause the internet ain't interested when someone says they are wrong. The internet wants to TELL them they are wrong, when they think they're right.
Re: I was wrong (part 2)
#10There won't be too many comments on this post cause the internet ain't interested when someone says they are wrong. The internet wants to TELL them they are wrong, when they think they're right.
I'm not sure that's so true. Everyone enjoys a good argument over what license the author should have used. )
I do get what you're saying but I think people discuss positive things all the time on even the worst sites. Admitting you're wrong isn't all that novel, but the changing of license is.