[Gllug] "Open source has its own problems" - article in Computing

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 04:08:45PM +0100, Gerard van Schip wrote:
> Rob Crowther wrote:
> >Intellectual Property - he states that all work done when in full time 
> >employment, whether at work or at home on personal time, is property 
> >of the employer, the natural conclusion of this is that most OSS is 
> >actually stolen from people's employers.
> 
> I think stolen is a strong word but it does make you wonder about coding 
> done in company time. Having said that, the company uses OSS which is 
> free. Is coding in company time on OSS and feeding that back into the 
> OSS community not a nice way of paying for the software you use?

The original article sounds like nonsense of course.

However it may well be true that you cannot work on OSS during or even
out of work.  Thus you should _always_ make sure that your contract
explicitly allows this.  Of course at Merjis almost anything we write
that could possibly be useful to others is liberated (on
http://merjis.com/developers), and in previous companies I've made
sure that the contract stated that work done in my own time, using my
own resources, not related to the mission of the company, was mine to
do with as I wanted.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
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