> My third year of unpaid leave from UW is up. I have to decide whether to return to UW or resign. If I return, it turns out that I would have to have at least a 50% appointment. I currently have 50% of one year of teaching in “credits”, which means I wouldn’t be required to teach for the first year I go back as a 50% appointment. Moreover, the current department chair (John Palmieri) understands and appreciates Sage – he is among the top 10 all time contributors to the source code of Sage!
To be perfectly honest, it's not that risky. It won't be hard for him to get an academic job somewhere if it doesn't work out. This is usually not the case, but for someone with his background, finding another academic job won't be difficult if he's willing to work outside of a highly-ranked research university math department (and the probability of being able to get one of those jobs is even good).
> I have decided to resign. I’m worried about issues of intellectual property; it would be extremely unfair to my employees, investors and customers if I took a 50% UW position, and then later got sued by UW as a result. Having a 50% paid appointment at UW subjects one to a lot of legal jeopardy, which is precisely why I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years.
This is a really easily solved legal issue. You draft up a quick little IP agreement that clarifies the desired state of affairs - problem solved. Resignation was not required, needed, and arguably made the legal risk worse.
UW C4C would likely get involved with such an agreement and pitch a fit, UW can be a vicious beast. They don't care about the community around them, beyond what will make UW $$$ or make UW seem more like an Ivy League. This recent dispute is illuminating: https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/workers-protest-uw-laundr...
Another thing I've seen go down was UWave.fm got a LP-FM license from the FCC, had a tower site and was lined up to set up a radio station at UW's Bothell campus, and the board decided to sit on the FCC approval till the very last day before the FCC needed hard dates on tower build and frequency use timelines, only to tell this student group that UW was canning the whole thing (despite it not costing UW a dime).
I've worked with plenty of patent licensing and tech transfer offices at universities. This isn't a situation where they'd pitch a fit. Worst case scenario, they need an email from a dept head directing them to get it dealt with.
Your average legal dept is overly conservative, not brain-dead.
I think OP thought navigating office politics to accomplish what you describe would be quite troublesome, and they would rather bank on the current department chair keeping C4C from taking action after they leave, rather than fight for basic rights inside UW.
I've spent a lot of time on exactly this sort of thing over the years, with very strong support from the math department. There are an enormous number of rules (laid out at Executive Orders like this: http://www.washington.edu/admin/rules/policies/PO/EO57.html), and the university works within the framework of all of those rules. So even if everybody agrees that it would be far make the most sense to do X, if the rules explicitly say "you can't do X", then you don't get to do X. It's very different than how things work in a small company (say), or maybe a smaller private university. UW is a massive (and old) state university, and isn't so flexible. For example, when I asked about being appointed at less than 50% time, we discovered here (https://ap.washington.edu/ahr/academic-titles-ranks/professo...) "Must be appointed at a minimum of 50%.", and that's that.
There are quite a few professors I've run into at Seattle Central and North Seattle College that have formerly taught at UW Seattle, but left due to situations like what you describe (dept is fully supportive of X happening, but due to an age old rule it will never happen).
UW has a ton of baggage and is quite inflexible compared to other institutions in the region and state, their lack of flexibility is enabled by having the highest tuition in the area ($11k vs $4k per year) and significantly higher state subsidies (UW, WSU, etc taking 60% of the state's college budget, yet only educating 40% of the students) than 2 year institutions.
FWIW, I think the title for your piece is doing you no favors. Titles are hard, so that's not intended as some zinger. I think it just set up a lot of people to think "Must be some flake that he would ask the internet to decide this hugely important personal thing for him!"
I only skimmed the article to try to determine if you were, in fact, asking the internet to help you decide. I got to the announcement that you had decisively decided and went "Meh, could use a better title."
Best of luck in your future endeavors, from an internet stranger who had never heard of you before today.
It wasn't actually intended as constructive criticism per se. Just observation concerning some of the replies I'm seeing posted on HN, which strike me as being influenced by the title rather than rooted in the obvious fact that you've had years to think about this and know what you are doing.
UW has tried overall to be as supportive as they can be within the parameters of Washington State law and University rules. I did get UW to sign something a few years ago, but it was clear that whatever work I did on CoCalc had to be on my own time, not using any UW resources. There's much more to why I resigned than just my fear of potential IP issues (note: the issues are not worse by resigning, because I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years, starting with a BSD-licensed codebase). An additional factor, which I didn't explain well, is that I would have to devote at least 50% time (so 20 hours a week) to work for UW, and this work would not be on CoCalc. Unfortunately, I have found that I am unable to do a good job working on CoCalc, if I have to spend 20 hours a week focused on other things. It's also impossible for me to respond to critical customer needs, server issues, etc., if I'm preparing to teach (or actually teaching) or in a committee meeting. For example, imagine that a 500-person course at UCLA has an exam coming up using CoCalc, and there is some issue with pushing out the exam to students, which I could easily fix if I could focus on it. I would feel terrible ignoring the UCLA course for a committee meeting or because I was teaching.
The article is a list with many incorrect decisions (like going to commercialisation office before asking anyone who had tried, etc), so I guess it shouldn't come as a big surprise they keep making them?
I look up to you because you are not just another random math professor producing papers that no one ever reads. Instead you take a risk and try to succeed at what you are most passionate about. In my opinion this is both more noble and more exciting than being a pure math professor. I sincerely hope CoCalc works out well for you, good luck!
> I have decided to resign.
NO, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?