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Re: contributing to OpenSAML


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  • From: "RL 'Bob' Morgan" <>
  • To: Tom Scavo <>
  • Cc: OpenSAML <>
  • Subject: Re: contributing to OpenSAML
  • Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 09:03:21 -0800 (PST)


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"




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