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

[Adrian McMenamin]

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 16:08 +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 law on this is crystal clear: if you code in company time the
copyright is vested in the company (unless the company has explicitly
agreed something else with you). However, the ownership of copyright has
not got much to do with whether you are writing free/oss code - the GPL
is designed to use copyright protection as lverage against anyone who
would seek to 'privatise' the source.

> 
> Gerard

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