From egagnon@j-meg.com Mon Apr 3 16:02:24 2000
Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2000 12:09:27 -0400
From: Etienne M. Gagnon
To: Robert Sim
Cc: cim-students@cim.mcgill.ca, rgrads@cs.mcgill.ca
Subject: Re: Proposed Intellectual Property Policy
Hi Robert.
I'd like to point out a very important, yet forgotten issue in this
Policy: "Free/Open Source Software"
It is surprising that McGill, one of the leading Canadian universities
in software research, is completely ignoring free software licenses
(like the GNU General Public License) in its Intellectual Property
Policy proposal. This is even more surprising given that a significant
number of workstations of the School of Computer Science are running on
the GNU/Linux operating system, which is based entirely on open source
software.
Reusing code released under free software licenses has now become a
necessity for academic software research. It would be unthinkable to do
any research in operating systems, for example, without starting from an
open source code base (like Linux). No student or academic research
team has the resources to redevelop a complete operating system kernel,
only to test a few new ideas.
The future of software research depends heavily on the possibility of
reusing existing software frameworks and develop new sub modules to test
new ideas. Doing otherwise would require years of software development,
just to rebuild a framework similar to what already exists. There are,
only two ways of achieving this:
1- Entering into restrictive license agreement with commercial software
vendors and obtain rights to reuse their code to do research.
2- Base new research on existing free/open source software.
Why is this important, in light of the McGill Intellectual Property
Policy? Because many of these licenses, and notably, the most popular
one "GNU General Public License", does require derivative works to be
licensed under the same license. In other words, the permission to
reuse open source software is conditional to licensing derivative works
under the same license.
The McGill Intellectual Property Policy proposal, as it stands, does not
allow McGill researchers to reuse free/open source software, unless they
get into a special agreement with McGill authorities (like the OTT) to
obtain the right to license their "future, yet unwritten" code under
such a license. Doing otherwise would put researchers in a copyright
infringement situation as:
- Releasing new code under a free software license without OTT approval
violates the Intellectual Property Policy.
- Not licensing new code under a free software license would infringe
the original work author's copyright.
Further more, the Intellectual Property Policy proposal ignores the open
source development model, where incremental versions of the work are
published on the internet, as soon as they are done, so that other
people (often students at other universities) test the software and
suggest improvements. This model of sharing (often through a public CVS
repository, which shows every line of code change, as soon as it is
written) conflicts with the policy vision of disclosing "Software that
[researchers] wish to develop for commercial purposes".
It is to be noted that open source software can be used for commercial
purposes. (Simply look at the number of companies that are based on
such software, like Red Hat, Cygnus). But it is impossible for the
original author of the work to claim a percentage of revenues. For
example, "Linus Torvalds" the original author of Linux, cannot sue Red
Hat to obtain a percentage of its profits, as he has licensed his code
under the GNU General Public License which gives everyone (including Red
Hat) the right to commercialize the code.
PROPOSAL
========
1) I suggest that you add the following in section "2. Definitions":
"Free Software License": A free (or open source) software license,
namely one of the following licenses:
- the GNU General Public License and,
- the GNU Library General Public License.
[A complete list of pre-approved licenses should be provided].
2) I suggest that you add the following in section "4.3 Exceptions
Applicable to Software":
h) where the software is licensed under a Free Software License. The
rights are then owned by the Inventor. The University shall
automatically be licensed to use in perpetuity, worldwide and on a
royalty free basis, the portion of the Work that has been developed by
an Author affiliated to the University. The University shall also be
licensed in perpetuity the complete work under the said Free Software
License.
========
Thanks.
Etienne M. Gagnon
gagnon@sable.mcgill.ca
Ph.D. student
School of Computer Science
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Etienne M. Gagnon, M.Sc. e-mail: egagnon@j-meg.com
Author of SableCC: http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/sablecc/
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