Re: mods for compiling perl && perl common packages

[Craig Burley <burley at gnu dot org>]

>I am simply wondering how what you wrote above is actually possible? I
>mean, in my country it is also true that my student projects are
>intellectual property of my University. But that's all. What I do in my
>own free time is my personal business and nobody can step in. How come
>this is not the case in the US? How can they monopolize your free time?

It *is* the case in the US, practically speaking, until they come
along and say "to get the funding to pay you to do this work, and/or
to buy the workstation(s) and software you want to use, you have
to sign this...".  And, in many situations, people are asked to sign
such documents the moment they go to work for, or perhaps even become
a student at, an organization.  (I don't think there's been a single
case of my taking a consulting, contracting, or temp position in the
past 8 years where I *haven't* had to negotiate changes to such a
document.  Before that, I did on occasion, but didn't have outside,
ongoing GNU work in mind.)

The main danger is that students might (conveniently) forget they've
signed such documents when they decide to "release" stuff to the
public domain.

The other danger is that they haven't signed such documents, but their
working (employer/employee, or student-using-university-equipment)
arrangements lend sufficient credence to the argument that anything
they create is, at least partially, the property of the university.

Joe's point stands: if someone is unwilling to sign a document saying
they've put code into the public domain, even if they're unwilling
to have their employer do so, that's a pretty clear warning sign
that there might be a problem.  It doesn't mean there is, but asking
people who claim to have released "their" code under public-domain
to take a few simple steps to document that can be a pretty good
way to shake out the problematic cases.

And taking the stance "it was claimed to be public domain, you'll
have to go to court to prove otherwise" might be effective, but
might, when "scaled up" to a project sufficiently successful to
attract strong commercial interest in sabotaging it, be precisely
the stance that, someday, leads to the success of such sabotage.

        tq vm, (burley)