Re: Franz Flavors & software copyright

[wilensky%ucbdali@Berkeley (Robert Wilensky)]

Thanks for your clarification.  Everything you said is consistent with my
understanding of the situation.  And you are correct in emphasizing the
complexity of the issue.  But I want to stress my main point.  This is
that the ``author'' holds the copyright.  It may be unclear who the author
is, but it is clearly NOT the university. 

In addition, many pieces of ``university-developed'' software have
contributions by unfunded students, and by faculty, whose salary is not paid
by the gov't (except maybe during the summer).  Furthermore, it would seem
to be unclear who the author is if it is, say, a student working as a gov't
sponsored r. a.  For example, the student's thesis is presumably his to
copyright, even if the student were paid by the gov't because it was not
part of what he was paid to do.  One could argue that a concommitant program
has the same status unless it were specifically contracted for.

Let me state that my main purpose was not to promote people selling their
code, but rather, to stop the universities from impeding its distribution.
As far as I know, the gov't hasn't tried to prevent us from giving each
other our software, but many universities have.  Therefore, we are better
off leaving them out of the picture entirely - legally this seems to be a
sound position.