Public Money Should Produce Public Software

Governmental funding agencies are funded by tax money from both individuals and corporations, so both should have equal access to the discoveries funded by the public money. In the case of software, this means equal access to the source code. On one hand, this speaks against the current use of 'free to non-profit' licenses, while on the other hand it may also speak against overly strict licenses such as the GPL[73,74]. Another concern is how this would affect legislation like the Bayh-Dole act[63]. Some of the key points of this legislation are:

• Non-profits, including universities, and small businesses may elect to retain title to innovations developed under federally-funded research programs
• Universities are expected to file patents on inventions they elect to own

First, organizations and authors may choose to retain all intellectual property with OSS. Source code files will still retain a copyright assignment to the organization or the author; the license ensures only that others are granted permission to use and modify the source code, giving credit to the original author.

Second, under this proposal Universities could still file patents, and then release the source code after the patent application. If the patent is based on hiding source code or algorithms, then this seems in direct conflict of the primary mission of the public funding agencies, and Universities shouldn't be filing them.