Public money, private code

The drive to license academic research for profit is stifling the spread of software that could be of universal benefit.

By Jeffrey Benner

Jan 4, 2002 | 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."

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