[Wolves] GPL, IP and patents..

[Old Dan]

Lee Parkes wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 04:17:08PM +0000, Old Dan wrote:
>>How exactly have they worded this?  It does sound a bit like the person 
>>who drafted this has something shoved up his/her own a$$.  Or needs to.
> 
> I'm not sure who wrote it, but I'm sure they don't understand the principles
> over free software and the GPL..
Do you have the actual clause handy?  I'm no legal expert but I'm sure 
there'll be someone here with more of an interest in legal matters... :)

>>copyright or other anyway and this is probably just seen by them as an 
>>added protection.
> 
> If it was derivative of company work then I'd say fair enough. However, it 
> depends on how general they want to be. For example, if I used iptables to
> solve a work problem and then used a similar idea to do something in my own 
> time then am I breaking the T&C of my contract?
No, probably not.  Are you allowed to work for anyone else while working
for them?  I know a lot of contracts forbid this.  (Not mine though,
thankfully)

They'd have one hell of a job actually enforcing anything like that, anyway.

>>Which software is it which is being worked on, is it /all/ based on 
>>GPLed stuff?
> 
> Linux for a start off, and anything that runs atop of Linux, e.g. PHP, MySQL,
> all of the normal networking tools and apps that are useful.
Ah well some of those are development tools/languages - I /think/ it may 
well be possible that code written with/for those tools could be made 
closed-source, after all it is possible to write closed-source stuff for 
Linux.  It could well be this IP they are trying to protect.

-- 
Dan