To the lay person the many companies in a race to claim patents for genes
seems to be contra productive and capable of weaking havoc against more
altruisic efforts. It also seems obsene because these companies use many
free technologies or discoveries from many other people in order to
discover genes for which their company then wishes to lay claim like some
sort of finders flag of ownership.
For those universities etc. who have been developing many key technologies
(from IT to medical) used in this kind of research; have any of them given
consideration to placing a GNU style license upon their technologies.
The GNU license in short says anyone may use the technology but anything
derived from it can not have a license more restrictive than the GNU one.
e.g. it prevents someone like Microsoft from making a copy of Linux and
selling it to the public for profit when the original is free.
In this case licenses could be made to say non-profit use of resulting
technologies will not be limited, or the like.
I was just wondering if such license concepts had been used outside of the
IT industry?
