On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 19:35, Evan McNabb wrote: > > The gist is that WordPerfect and Novell both came out of BYU one way > > or another and BYU never saw a dime. They have a policy now (I'll have > > to dig up the actual document some day) that all creative works > > produced while you're a student or faculty of BYU is property of BYU. > > Many Universities have policies like this. Most students ignore it, of > > course, but most professors can't. The Tech. Transfer Office was > > created to handle sales of technologies created at BYU. > > I've had this question in the past. If I work for BYU (which I do) and write > a useful program or script, how can I go about GPLing it? Do I need to get > permission from some office, set the copyright being from BYU, and then > GPL it? Has anyone gone through this process?
Knowing how BYU works it's better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. BYU, since the Novell debacle, has been exceptionally greedy. They'll most likely say no, without even understanding or looking at the issue. I'd say just GPL it from the start. Make the COPYING thing there right from the start. Assign dual copyright to BYU and you (though you'll probably not have a legal copyright since you have no rights at BYU or any work place). Then we'll see what happens. Lot's of universities produce open code, though, so BYU may see the prestige aspect and forgo it's usual greediness. I try to be extremely careful to never work on any personal project at work, just to avoid these copyright issues. But I'm going to GPL all the useful things I've written for work by the time I'm done working for BYU including the LDAP scripts I've written, any generic web admin pages and so forth. Michael > > -Evan -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
