all your residuals are belong us say MS

On 4 Dec 2005 09:59:27 -0800, Daeron

First, NCSA owns the copyrights to the work done by the students. Second, the Mosaic license is only a non-commercial license. If you were a contributor to Mosaic, say by the name of Marc Andreessen, you couldn't legally use your own contbributions to Mosaic in your new commercial endeavor. In other words, you couldn't profit from your own work because NCSA took all the rights for it.

Now, unlike NCSA, Microsoft allows the contest participants to keep their rights to their work, they just have to allow Microsoft to use it as well. So the students can go on to create their own commercial works based upon it.

Which is more fair?

Wrong. The regents of UCB Berkely OWN the code to BSD, no matter who may have written it. None of the original contributors are mentioned in any of the documentation for BSD. Just because Berkeley decided to license it freely doesn't change the fact that they took the rights from their students.

Further, NCSA owns the rights to Mosaic, and the students who worked on it DID forfeit their copyrights, or as you put it, "sign over their own thoughts".

So in other words, it's not even direct access to the source code. It's any information that people working with the students might have absorbed either knowingly or subconsciously.

This is like, say, if someone were to gain access to the Windows source code, and then sometime later contribute to an open source OS a technique similar to something they read in the Windows source code, which they may not even remember came from there.

I'm not talking about the BSD license. I'm talking about the original works done by students, now owned by UCB Berkeley, and without credit.