okay, and the Physics department too, but the EE and CS folks tend to write more code...)
Physics code is kind of scary sometimes anyway. ;)
Maybe we could start with a page on the UUG site that details Open Source contributions by students at BYU.
This is an excelent idea.
We could even have a club meeting on ``Open Source Development'' where we talk about autoconf, README's, licensing, SourceForge, Freshmeat, creating and applying patches, development mailing lists, and the whole sha-bang.
I agree. The Open Source concept can't survive if people only /use/ the software. I also agree that there's a lot of talent here.
We can also encourage professors to cover Open Source development and the GPL in their classes, suggesting to students that they release their code for their projects under the GPL
I wish this were possible, but I don't think it can happen. We had a discussion about this (half joking, half very serious) over Art's art.
http://uug.byu.edu/pipermail/uug-list/2003-February/000850.html
There was some suggestion that you could let BYU own the copyright and still license it under the GPL (maybe), but I don't think that a professor could /advocate/ open sourcing a project done for school. It's unfortunate, but true, that there are legal implications.
http://techtransfer.byu.edu/documents/ippolicy.htm#_IV.E._Student_Ownership
If, on the other hand, you can show (hard to do) that you didn't use school resources to build your project you might be safe.
Maybe another option would be a BSD style license. Then the school can make money off it if they want to try, and you can release it.
Personally I'm in favor of open sourcing anything you do that's worth while, school related or not. I think BYU's policies reach further than they should.
I have a friend who hates proprietary software (with a passion) but even though he writes useful code for personal projects all the time he hasn't even considered open source. That makes me sad.
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