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"Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
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Date:
Sat, 24 Feb 2001 09:19:40 -0800
Reply-To:
"Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <[log in to unmask]>
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From:
"Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <[log in to unmask]>
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From: Bob Leif
To: Robin P Reagan et al.
US Law specifically gives the grant recipient rights to the intellectual
property. In my case as a chemist, I have received funding from the US
government and filed patents on my inventions. I also copyright my software.
The US government wishes to stimulate both innovation and delivery to the
marketplace. What are the rules for ESPRIT and other European grant funding?

I believe that the members of the US Ada community should be seeking Small
Business Innovation Research Grants, SBIRs. Does anyone know of an SBIR
being funded where it was proposed that the product would be covered by a
GNU type license?

-----Original Message-----
From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Robin P Reagan
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2001 7:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Microsoft lobbies gov't to control open source!


<snip>

> OK, I'm writing from the UK, but .. I don't see any reason why public
> funding should be used to support private gain. If you want to make
> private profits, go and do your own research! I would have expected
> Americans to hold such a view even more strongly.

As an American, I don't see any reason why an American company should not
be allowed to use code developed with American public money to make a
profit as long as the rest of the the country (corporations and
individuals) have access to the original code as well. If  American tax
dollars were used to create some program that is very useful, then why
shouldn't an American company be able to profit from it? In theory, they
have as much right to that code as any other American tax payer.

An example of this might be the *BSD code as it was developed at UCB with
the support of public tax dollars, Apple is now using FreeBSD (which is a
direct decendent of UCB-BSD) as the core of their new operating system,
OS X. I, as a tax payer, have no problems with this, AAMOF, this is one
example of why I prefer the BSD license over the GPL.

If a company contracts with a public institution to produce some part of a
software product, that part of the end product should be released under a
BSD style license because that software was developed with the support of
tax dollars. Even if the company "funded" the development effort, the
university is a public institution and the orginization/experience the
company is drawing from is public!

$0.02US

<snip>

--
|     .~~~/"\~~~.
|   / / / |^| \ \ \  Robin Reagan
|  / // //Y Y\\ \\ \  [log in to unmask]
| // /  /~~~~~\  \ \\  http://reagans.org/
|/                   \
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the
limits of the world."---Schopenhauer

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