Stan, Interesting questions! I'll tell you what our marketing, design, and development studio (Found Line) does. I have some ideas on how our approach compares and contrasts with what others in the industry do, but I'd rather not make too many assumptions about other companies so I'll stick to talking about what we do.
First, we *never* do work for hire. This is, in my opinion, a really bad idea for most creative firms. There are many problems with work for hire including putting your intellectual property at risk (for you and your clients!). Also, the laws on work for hire are strange when it comes to software - I'm not even sure if it's possible for software to be done as a work for hire (other than as an employee, of course). For all non-software work (design, illustration, copy, etc.) we do a *full* copyright transfer to the client, upon full payment, of the delivered work. The client typically does not get copyright transferred on rounds leading up to the final deliverable. We do *not* charge any licensing or royalty fees. The client owns the work (assuming they paid their invoice) and can use it however they would like. For software, we don't do a full copyright transfer as this would impractical. With software it makes sense to be able to reuse code, and if we transferred copyright we would never be able to do this. Instead, we license software to our clients using the free/open source New BSD License. This gives us full protection - we still hold the copyright and own the software. It also gives our clients total freedom - they can use the software however they want, modify the source code, release modified (or unmodified) versions, even integrate it with proprietary software if they want. We build all of our web applications now on Zend Framework which also uses the New BSD License so this helps keep licensing simple and consistent for our clients. Thanks, Bradley On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Stanley Brinkerhoff <s...@vtwireless.com> wrote: > Hey All, > > As many of us do -- I have a few groups that I do work with that > occasionally want me to help them with some work on their website. One such > group works with an out of state Vendor that has locked them in pretty > tight, developing everything "in their cms" that is proprietary and closed > source. From my past experience as a consultant doing web-work, as well as > taking over contracts of over consultants (and losing a few), as well as my > limited experience with media organizations in Vermont -- what is the > prevalence towards the attitude towards ownership of the work-for-hire of > both design and application development? > > Is it standard for closed-source inhouse-developed CMS vendors to say "you > cant access any code we've developed"? > Is it standard for vendors to say "we made it we own it" in terms of > content, assets (flash, pdf, etc), and design? > Is it standard for full-custom code (in PHP, Python, etc) to be fully > licensed to the customer and changes to the source allowed without > distribution rights? > > My belief was that most companies provided a royalty free, perpetual, and > source license to their cms products. Specifically this belief was enforced > by attending the Montpelier Vermont website selection committee in which the > three vendors who were finalists all said their products were the property > (whenever possible) of the client. > > The exception to this (taht seems ok) would be someone selling a sourced > based framework/toolkit in which a site is deevloped on (ie, a website > developed on an ASP.NET platform with Microsoft's toolkit), or otherwise > commercially available and supported system that is documented and is > decoupled from the work-for-hire. > > Thoughts? Experiences? I know we have a few developers on this list > (*cough*) who can contact me off list as well if they prefer. > > Stan > -- http://bradley-holt.blogspot.com/
