[3838] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Tex IP attribution error on startup page
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed May 7 15:37:30 2003
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Phillip Long <longpd@mit.edu>
Cc: release-team@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <90FF99D3-80BE-11D7-8540-000393B2A804@mit.edu>
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Date: 07 May 2003 15:37:28 -0400
Message-Id: <1052336248.26259.10.camel@equal-rites.mit.edu>
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On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 15:03, Phillip Long wrote:
> Hi: The Library has informed me that the start up page for Tex has a
> statement that says that the Intellectual Property ownership of stuff
> written in Tex is owned by the student. They claim that this should
> read that the ownership of things written in Tex belongs to the
> Institute, not the individual.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "tex startup page." Users who run tex
do not automatically receive any message about owership of intellectual
property as far as I know (contrary to what Oliver said).
Friends of mine theorize that this issue might be about the thesis
templates for tex. To the best of my knowledge, the ownership of theses
varies from department to department and depending on other
circumstances such as whether the institute funded you while you wrote
it. The thesis templates are located in the thesis locker, which I
believe falls under the purview of the consultants and/or the faculty
liaisons, not the release team.
The idea that anything an MIT student writes specifically in TeX belongs
to the institute is bizarre. TeX is freely available software; we
happen to support an installation of it on Athena, but I can't see any
reason why we'd want to assert ownership of material written using that
particular tool.
