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

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 11:34 AM, S P Arif Sahari
Wibowo<arifsaha-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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?

Yes, I expect that it would.

If the employee was not permitted to release the code, then that has
adverse results all around.

This is something I have specifically discussed with my company's HR
department, as it would cause Major Heartburn to be unable to
contribute
to free software projects.

> 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.

Projects don't tend to directly pay attention to the details; the
"scalable" way is to ask contributors to verify that they have
permission to release their code to the project.

People can always lie, but this isn't the sort of place where that is
too likely to happen terribly much.  And it's a mighty public lie, in
some important senses.
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
Alfred Hitchcock  - "Television has brought back murder into the home
- where it belongs." -
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/alfred_hitchcock.html
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists