OpenSAML user discussion

["RL 'Bob' Morgan" <>]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Tom Scavo wrote:

> Does this apply to faculty as well as staff?  If so, how is it possible 
> that so many faculty and staff work as consultants or have private 
> businesses on the side?

The fact of the employer/university having control of the IPR that the 
employee produces doesn't mean that they say no to consulting 
arrangements, it just means the employee has to ask.  In my experience, 
with professional staff like Scott and me universities are happy to say 
yes to a moderate level of outside consulting because it keeps us happy 
and still employed at the U.  Faculty is a whole nother thing, since of 
course academic work is traditionally controlled by the academic who 
creates it.  The whole world of research spinoffs taking advantage of 
university IPR and infra is, uh, exciting and complicated, I'm no expert.

The issue of university staff programmers contributing to open source 
projects has been raised in some of the IT policy meetings I attend, and 
basically it boils down to just one aspect of overall management of your 
programmers:  management should of course always be aware of what their 
people are spending time/money/equipment on, and ensure that that work is 
meeting organizational goals.  I expect that the use of contributor 
agreements will increase, and will promote info-sharing between 
programmers and management about what they're actually up to.  And this is 
why standard governance and licensing methods for OS projects is 
important, so the managers making decisions about this can have a clue 
about what's happening to the OS stuff their staff is producing.

> Where can I read about this, do you know?

You might poke around at http://www.autm.net/, the Association of 
University Technology Managers.

 - RL "Bob"