NYT on the Theft of Altair BASIC

From: Eric J. Korpela <korpela_at_siren.ssl.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed Sep 20 13:41:02 2000

> At 08:55 AM 9/20/00 -0700, Eric J. Korpela wrote:
> >It's more the point is that Gates and Co. used U.S. government and Harvard
> >University computers to develop their BASIC. If Harvard had done what it
> >was well within its rights to do and claimed ownership of the code or placed
> >it in the public domain, rather than just giving Gates the boot, the computing
> >world might be a somewhat different place.
>
> Yes, but universities are also well-known for letting researchers
> and even students use their computers for whatever purpose they
> like, without regard for the intellectual property rights...

Not the Univerisity I work for. It claims rights to any code I develop
on university computers. (But fortunately it doesn't have a problem of open
source or public domain release of most source code.) There was a volunteer
on a project here that tried to use some software developed here for a
commercial venture. The university made him rewrite it from scratch...
And he wasn't even paid for his work...

Eric
Received on Wed Sep 20 2000 - 13:41:02 BST