SCN: Open source

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

====================


The drive to license academic research for profit is stifling the 
spread of software that could be of universal benefit.  Researchers 
who want to release their work to the public as open-source 
software often face an uphill battle.  


(Jeffrey Benner, Salon)---Would the creation of the Internet be 
allowed to happen today?  

The networked society we live in is in large part a gift from the 
University of California to the world. In the 1980s, computer 
scientists at Berkeley working under contract for the Defense 
Department created an improved version of the Unix operating 
system, complete with a networking protocol called the TCP/IP 
stack. Available for a nominal fee, the operating system and 
network protocol grew popular with universities and became the 
standard for the military's Arpanet computer network. 

In 1992, Berkeley released its version of Unix and TCP/IP to the 
public as open-source code, and the combination quickly became 
the backbone of a network so vast that people started to call it, 
simply, "the Internet."  

Many would regard giving the Internet to the world as a benevolent 
act fitting for one of the world's great public universities. But Bill 
Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual 
property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a 
mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably 
didn't understand what they were doing," he says.  

Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would 
turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed 
the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a 
royalty for the U.C. Regents on Internet usage years into the 
future. It is the kind of deal his department, the Office of 
Technology Licensing, cuts all the time.  

Hoskins' "privatize it" attitude has become the norm among 
administrators at many universities and federal labs across the 
country. As a result, computer-science professors and researchers 
who want to release their work to the public as open-source 
software often face an uphill battle.  

Some familiar with the situation say the problem is that universities 
and federal research labs have become more interested in making 
money than serving the public interest.  

Larry Smarr, a professor of computer science at U.C. San Diego 
and one of the country's top experts on supercomputing, is one of 
them. As former director of the National Center for Supercomputing 
Applications at the University of Illinois, where the original Mosaic 
Web browser was created, he's quite familiar with both sides of the 
debate.  

"Some universities are dead set against giving software code 
away," says Smarr. "But I don't think universities should be in the 
moneymaking business. They ought to be in the changing-the-
world business, and open source is a great vehicle for changing 
the world."  

Open-source software describes program code that is made 
publicly available for anyone to copy, change or even sell. The 
best-known open-source programs, such as Linux and Apache, are 
the product of a collaborative process of software development 
that takes advantage of the contributions of thousands of 
programmers all over the world. It's not only a cheap way to 
produce software; with so many eyes looking at the code, the 
theory is, bugs are found and fixed more quickly than with 
proprietary software.  

Over the past several years, open-source software development 
has won high-profile adherents in the business world -- including 
the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems. But it has always had its 
strongest fans in the academic world, where open-source software 
is seen as a natural extension of the idea that the fruits of 
academic research should be shared with everyone.  

But now some academic programmers on the cutting edge have 
found that the licensing office is proving a more formidable 
obstacle to progress than the limits of their imagination and skill.  

Pete Beckman, formerly a senior computer scientist at the federal 
laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., is a pioneer in creating clusters of 
servers that rival the power of mainframe supercomputers. He had 
to fight with lab lawyers for months before receiving permission to 
open-source his department's work on the clusters.  

Part of the lab's reticence was concern about letting computer 
technology fall into the hands of America's enemies, according to 
Beckman. "But the lab's other motive for keeping technology 
private is the misguided belief they can license it and make money 
on the lab system," he says. "They have whole departments 
dedicated to extracting intellectual property from the labbies."  

Before Beckman led the fight at Los Alamos to establish a protocol 
for making lab software public, "the only way to get your code 
released open source was to declare it worthless," he says. 
Beckman won his fight back in 1999, but the old standard still 
applies at other federal labs.  

"Some federal labs can release code, others can't," Beckman says. 
"There are whole departments that create valuable new 
technology, and they can't get it out to the world because [the lab] 
is trying to make money off it." Software for modeling global climate 
change, the behavior of viral epidemics and traffic patterns are 
among the programs researchers can't get released, he says.  

In a white paper Beckman authored on the problem, he wrote, 
"Seeking to control computer-science research by putting 
intellectual property concerns before the goal of good science has 
destroyed countless projects."  

Just how many is hard to say. Most researchers are reluctant to 
criticize their administrators. It is rare that universities flat out 
refuse a request to release software, but the hassle of getting 
permission can discourage those who might otherwise release 
their work. "It's tricky to find examples," says Rebecca Eisenberg, a 
law professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in 
intellectual property policy. "Because most technology fails, it's 
hard to say something would have succeeded" if only it had been 
put in the public domain.  

Nevertheless, Eisenberg is convinced that university interest in 
licensing intellectual property for profit is often at odds with the 
advancement of science. "You can make a clear case that 
research is being slowed by intellectual property claims," she says. 

"Universities aren't distinguishing between times when it's 
important to have a patent in place to get something disseminated 
and times when it's not," Eisenberg says. "They're just looking to 
see if they can make money. It retards innovation and taxes 
development."  

It took Chris Johnson, a computer-science professor at the 
University of Utah, several years of negotiation with his technology 
transfer office to get permission to make public a program his team 
had worked on for years.  

Called SCIRun (pronounced "ski run"), the program is a software 
platform for modeling and solving all sorts of complicated scientific 
problems. One of its most promising applications is as a tool for 
designing new medical devices. Because it is a foundation upon 
which other programs can be built, Johnson felt that making it an 
open-source-code project was fundamental to its value.  

"The hope is people will take this and put in their own applications 
and share those back with the community," Johnson says. But to 
do that, they have to be able to see and use the code without 
having to pay for it or get permission. "A lot of smart people out 
there can show you new and better ways for you, if they can see 
under the hood," Johnson says.  

But when he tried to explain to the university administration that 
the best way to maximize the value of SCIRun was to give it away, 
he ran into a roadblock. "We wanted to open-source it," Johnson 
says. "But they said that would undermine its commercial value."  

The negotiations began, a clash of differing cultures and interests. 
"No one really knew what we were doing at the beginning," 
Johnson says. "We didn't really understand intellectual property 
law, and they didn't really understand open source. The university 
just didn't want to let commercial value go. We're academics who 
wanted to push the envelope."  

After two years of haggling, they reached a compromise. In March, 
the software was released under a license that allows academics 
free access to the code but reserves the right to royalties if the 
code makes its way into a commercial software product.  

It hasn't always been this way. In the eighties, UC Berkeley was a 
pioneer in giving away software for the betterment of society. The 
rapid dissemination of "BSD Unix" allowed Internet-connected 
computers to speak the same language, helping to make our 
networked world possible.  

But now the University of California is often mentioned as one of 
the institutions that have taken the craze for exclusive patents and 
licenses too far. "It changed in the late eighties and early nineties," 
says Susan Graham, a professor of computer science at Berkeley. 
She didn't remember there even being an Office of Technology 
Licensing back when the department gave away Unix and the 
Internet protocols.  

If those innovations were discovered today, Graham worries they 
would end up in corporate hands. "I don't know whether they would 
let us release software like TCP/IP today," she says. "If they 
thought it had monetary value, they would want a revenue stream. 
There would be companies who could pay for it. I'm not sure we 
would have the same outcome [as in the past], and that's what 
concerns me."  

The trend at universities toward trying to profit from intellectual 
property began with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. 
Bayh-Dole allows institutions doing research for the federal 
government -- mostly universities -- to own the intellectual property 
they produce, and sell the rights to private companies. Because 
most cutting-edge research at both public and private universities 
involves some federal funding, Bayh-Dole allows universities to lay 
claim to many of their faculty's inventions. The same rights were 
later extended to the federal research labs.  

The philosophy behind Bayh-Dole is economic stimulation through 
privatization. When the law passed, the federal government held 
roughly 28,000 patents, but fewer than 5 percent of these were 
licensed to industry for development of commercial products, 
according to the Council on Government Relations, a lobbying 
group for research universities. By giving contractors a chance to 
sell the rights to technology developed in the course of publicly 
funded research, Congress hoped to spark an economic boom 
with taxpayer-funded technology.  

Overall, the model has been a dramatic success. The transfer of 
technology from university labs into offices, factories and stores 
was fundamental to the growth of Silicon Valley and the success of 
the new economy. Since 1980, university inventions licensed to 
the private sector under Bayh-Dole have spawned over 2,200 new 
companies that generate about $30 billion in economic activity 
every year, according to the Association of University Technology 
Managers.  

Statistics like these explain the enduring enthusiasm among most 
policy experts for privatizing the public's intellectual property. But a 
few eloquent dissenters have begun to argue that taking 
privatization of the nation's intellectual property too far could stifle 
innovation and suffocate economic growth.  

The champion of this broad thesis is Stanford law professor Larry 
Lessig, who has just outlined this argument in a new book, "The 
Future of Ideas." Lessig worries that the proper balance between 
private intellectual property (Microsoft) and the public good (the 
Internet) has been lost, and our society is blindly moving toward 
too much private control over intellectual property. "The shift is not 
occurring with the idea of balance in mind," he wrote; "instead, the 
shift proceeds as if control were the only value."  

The most powerful examples that privatizing technology does not 
always equal progress are public code like the Internet's and open-
source software. They are cases of technology that derive their 
value from being public and free; fences kill them. "The open-
source movement is an endorsement of the value of the public 
domain," Eisenberg says. "It's a striking counter-example to the 
bias of public policy: that the public domain dooms technology to 
obscurity."  

The systemic bias toward privatization, which Bayh-Dole codified 
into law, has the scientists working on improved versions of the 
Internet worried.  

"For the last 20 years, public money has backed proprietary 
systems software," says Rick Stevens, who is working on "grid 
computing" software at Argonne National Lab. "We're saying, stop 
putting public money there."  

Ian Foster, another computer scientist working at Argonne, agrees. 
"I believe that in almost all cases, the interests of science and 
society alike are best served by free distribution of software 
produced in research labs and universities. Unfortunately, there 
are still institutions that place significant obstacles in the way of 
researchers who wish to follow this path. Agencies funding 
research could help things by making strong statements in favor of 
open source, so that this is the norm rather than the exception."  

Some government agencies are starting to get the message. Open-
source development for grid software and other supercomputing 
applications is getting some government funding. The Department 
of Energy, which runs Argonne, has been supporting open-source 
projects for years. In April, the National Security Agency 
announced it would help to make a version of the Linux-based 
operating system secure enough for the Defense Department to 
use.  

Universities are starting to rediscover the value of open-sourcing 
software, too. Stanford, the institution at the hub of Silicon Valley, 
lets its faculty release software under a public license. "We pretty 
much go with what our faculty members want to do," says Kathy 
Ku, who heads the licensing office there. "We care about the 
academic mission more that the money."  

Elsewhere, the struggle goes on. "It's trying to find a balance 
between the academic mission and commercialization," Johnson, 
the Utah professor, says. "This is a hot topic in universities right 
now, and everyone is really struggling with it. Some universities 
have really gone overboard. It's not going to be an easy thing to 
resolve."  


Copyright 2002 Salon.com





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