[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: March 12, 2007

[Conrad Parker]

On 13/03/07, Wolfgang Jeltsch <g9ks157k at acme.softbase.org> wrote:
> Am Montag, 12. März 2007 03:52 schrieb Donald Bruce Stewart:
> >      * [41]Why Publish CS Papers Without Code?
> > 41. http://billmill.org/why_no_code
>
> Interesting!
>
> This leads me to the question how copyright of code fragments included in
> conference papers is handled.  Say, I submit a paper containing some code
> fragments to the ICFP.  I have to assign  the copyright of the paper to the
> ACM.  Does this mean that the ACM will hold the copyright of the code
> fragments?  Does this mean that I'm not allowed to publish the source code
> containing these code fragments as open source software somewhere?

(I am not a lawyer, etc)

If your paper simply cites, and quotes from, code that you have
already published elsewhere (eg. on your own web site), then I think
that would simply count as a citation.

If on the other hand your paper contains your code verbatim and
doesn't cite it (ie. the code is previously unpublished) then perhaps
you are assigning the copyright of it.

So it may be a good idea to always make available open source projects
before publishing about them in academic papers, and to always include
a citation to the open source project web site or tech report.

Besides, <tshirt>If it's not open source, it's not computer
science</tshirt>. Science demands repeatable results, computer science
demands literate programming. The solution is not to shy away from
including code, or else the IP lawyers have won, science is banned and
we get plunged into another Dark Age.

cheers,

Conrad.