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 12:12 PM, S P Arif Sahari Wibowo
<arifsaha-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, Christopher Browne wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Well, this make sense if you develop the software in company time. Will this still apply when you contribute to FOSS in your own time?

If your employment contract indicates that intellectual property
belongs to the employer, then yes.

>>
>> People can always lie,
>
> People may not realize it. It is probably not a common sense that what you do in your spare time with your own tool can be owned by your employer. So one may contribute to a FOSS project not knowing that. Later after few years, the company may realize that (or some other lawyer suing the company), and seize all the work contributed not only by that employee but all works done on the top of it by others, rendering several years of works gone. This obviously assuming the law works that way (which is my question).

Free software projects have had this issue as one of their concerns
for a Very Long Time.  For instance, the FSF has required copyright
assignment as documented
<http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html> for
many years now.

Quoting the relevant bits:
"Before incorporating significant changes, make sure that the person
who wrote the changes has signed copyright papers and that the Free
Software Foundation has received and signed them. We may also need an
employer's disclaimer from the person's employer."

Maintainers of significant projects *know* they need to ask about this.

There is the classic dictum: "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

Failure to bother to read your employment contract isn't a
particularly good excuse, either.
--
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
Fred Allen  - "California is a fine place to live - if you happen to
be an orange."
--
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