On choosing a license for software in academia In my university, professors in Computer Science decide by themselves the licenses for the code of their research group. This happens without consulting the university legal team (or the university, more generally). As an undergrad researcher, this strikes me as incredibly odd.
I have the following questions:

Is this common practice?
Is this good practice?
How should a situation like this be handled?

Is it reasonable to expect the software only to be published only if the contributors that did most of the work agree on it?
The software may or may not have economic value. Is it reasonable to expect the professor to consult if he is allowed to distribute it under open-source licenses?



For more specific context, I have checked the percentages of ownership on patents. It turns out research Groups get &lt;10% of the ownership. My university doesn't have any special rules for software.
I have no interest in my possible ownership of this software. However, it worries me that my group director is able to make this decision on his own.
The software developed by most academics has no commercial value. It is a research product, similar to a paper, and is usually shared with other researchers by hosting it on the researcher’s web page (as I do) or on GitHub or other repositories. There is usually no need for any sort of license, but some people will include a license to make clear what use by others of their code they see as acceptable.
There is also no need for the university to be involved in any of these decisions, just like the university doesn’t tell researchers what “license” to use for the papers they publish. I think your main source of confusion is related to thinking of research code as some kind of valuable property that needs to be protected. In 99% of cases that’s not the reality.