I find that the article is conflating the interests of the general public with those of a private company. A lot of money investment goes into research by a University. It is not clear to me why they shouldn't attempt to monetize it. At the extreme, yes, this may turn out to become patent trolling. Surely, there is a middle path where the university gets compensated for the amount of investment that goes in.
Except it isn't a false dichotomy like many of those questions. Either you agree that it should be free software or you don't. Privately funded institutions can do whatever they want in my opinion, but I don't think public funds should be used to produce closed software. Do you agree?
Edit: to clarify, I'm not saying everything they do should be released, but that whenever possible, any substantial technology should be designed so that it could be useful to other people or researchers and released with either some kind of free license or into the public domain.
Rather than higher taxes I would prefer simply to reallocate the budget. Rather than giving a billion dollars to the NSA to build a data center in Utah, give it to Universities to do research and publish it for free.
> Do you agree/disagree that the government should give more money to universities, so all research can be free (as in freedom).
This phrasing I agree with (conditionally). I think as a taxpayer if more money can let research be free with patents acting more like a way of enforcing that downstream work done based on that patent is also not patentable.
To give you guys some more context. I don't necessarily think that the interests of the public are the same as the interests of a corporation. E.g. if I do research on finding a new way of curing AIDS and Big Pharma 101 takes that research and changes one tiny molecule, patents the resulting product and sells it for exorbitant costs, I should have a way to either make them pay or force to not sell it for such a cost. Considering that it is leveraged on my research.
The same thing happens in a lot of contracting arrangements. Federal government contracts software development work, and the developer generally retains intellectual property rights to whatever is developed (unlike most private software development contracting arrangements).
To your question: I'm not sure. To the extent universities can generate revenue from developments that were publicly funded, they need less public funding in the future. Unfortunately I don't see that happen much; the revenue goes into funding a large administrative bureaucracy to manage licensing and technology transfer.
> You don't think all software that researchers/grad students write should be open source??
Erm...I am not going to make declarative statements one way or the other. I have worked on academic projects where the nature of the grant means that the work done goes to a private/defense source. Also, I think there is a distinction between software and research papers being open sourced and patents.
