How about creating / developing FOSS? Re: what is the situation wrt. ideas created by employees while employed ? who owns them ?

[S P Arif Sahari Wibowo]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Peter wrote:
> I.e. if A works for B and develops a product C independently 
> from his 'daytime' work,

I thought about this before related to FOSS: if C above 
publishes the software products under a FOSS license, will that 
hold? Can instead B claim ownership and invalidate that FOSS 
release? Ok obviously this depend on the contract, but for the 
sake of argument let's say the contract is the most evil one 
where B is a software company and claim ownership of everything 
C make. Will that contract hold against the published FOSS?

I think this is important since if that kind of contract can 
make employer own the software developed under FOSS license, 
means everybody involved in FOSS project must be careful about 
their contract employment, and a FOSS project coordinator must 
be careful about the employment of everybody donating to the 
project.

Go up the ladder a bit, how about when C see a need for a tool 
or library in his/her job, but instead develop it in-house and 
let B own it, C start a new project in his/her own time (let's 
in a vacation), using entirely his/her own tool, to develop that 
tool / library as a FOSS. Later C use that tool / library in 
his/her job with B (let's say B do allow using external FOSS 
tool / library in the job). Will this work or can B claim 
ownership?

In a related issue, what if C get a GPL library (not from C) for 
his/her software project in B, and without consulting to B 
publish the resulting software (which obviously will be required 
to be GPL). Beside the fact that C maybe breaking its contract 
and B can discipline C, can B "retract" the publication of the 
resulting software under GPL?

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