[SciPy-user] plotting enhancements and copyright

[John J. Lee]

On 1 Nov 2001, A.J. Rossini wrote:
[...]
> With a BSD license, I think there is less of an issue.  However, it is
> still cleaner to have a single license and copyright holder, than to
> force people to make sure that each module is properly usable.  The
[...]

I guess many of the possible contributors work at universities, who
usually (like other employers) claim copyright on everything that their
staff produce in the course of their work, so I'm wondering: do people
ever actually take this seriously for relatively small (or large, for that
matter) pieces of software without obvious commercial value?  Even if
universities are happy to give permission for free use in some sense,
remembering the CNRI/Python case, it wouldn't suprise me if some
institutions insist on retaining copyright, or even restricting use to
non-commercial users, as a matter of policy.  Mind you, it also wouldn't
suprise me if people generally ignored the legal requirement to get
permission from their employer...

Of course, in the case of Scipy, there *is* obvious commercial value in
it (independent of whether or not it is being sold).


John