While I was working as an assistant researcher three years ago, my contract also considered all research-derived knowledge uni property. In this case, pretty much anything tangentially related to HTTP performance enhancements would have been claimable by them.
It the software is GPL, and you use it for your company/university to do work with, that is a very dubious claim and more likely falsifiable in court.
Re:IBM acquires Red Hat
by evancox100 on Monday October 29, 2018 @06:47AM
(#18326369)
GPL is a license applied to a work by the copyright owner after (or at the time of) creation. It has nothing to do with authorship of the work and who owns the copyright.
To elaborate, even if GP developed code as part of a GPL project, the copyright owner could prevent him/her from distributing that code to anyone else, whether that distribution occurs under the GPL or any other license.
If you use any (and I mean any) school funded resources for any of your personal projects, yes, they usually have a basis for a claim.
I have a friend who went to Utah for his bachelor's in CS.
Re:IBM acquires Red Hat
by _emacsomancer_ on Monday October 29, 2018 @10:16AM
(#18327693)
I'm not in CS, but my understanding is that the CS dept has a historical relation with the FSF.
It's not entirely unreasonable - imagine someone in Biochemistry developing some drug using University labs etc. and then turning around and selling the formula to a private lab.
But it's the petty bureaucratisation which is infuriating. (And usually the people making the decisions aren't practically qualified.)