HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA (04/10/84)
From: Charles Hedrick <HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA> How do other Universities interpret the provisions in the Unix license referring to availability of the results of research? We are just getting into Unix. One of our major research projects is doing work in collaboration with an industrial lab. While our research itself is public, they will no doubt be hacking on software from this lab, and it is not public. The researchers are worried that they are going to be placed in an unresolvable conflict between provisions of licensing agreements with this lab and with ATT. Here are the alternatives I can see: - every piece of software on the system must be in the public domain. This is obviously crazy. It wouldn't allow us to buy a compiler from a 3rd party. Clearly we must be able to run proprietary software. - piece of software that we work on must be in the public domain. This makes a bit more sense, but would mean that we couldn't fix bugs in proprietary software. I hope this isn't what is meant. - the substance of our research must be public. This would allow us to work on proprietary software when it is needed for our work. - the term "results" as used in the ATT license refer to the actual scientific findings. These are normally embodied in publications in journals, and in working papers. Those are of course public. Any software that we develop is merely a tool for conducting the research, and is not the actual results. This is the normal interpretation that government agencies place on research, and is the reason why software developed under government support is no longer required to be in the public domain. The only thing that this would rule out is a project whose primary goal was software development. As long as the software could be represented as being secondary to a scientific goal, it would not be considered the results of the research. My inclination is to adopt the last alternative. As I understand the law, ambiguous terms are interpreted in the light of current practice. I believe that current practice in research contracts considers research to be non-commercial if the scientific results are published, but does not require that software developed as a side-effect be freely distributed. -------