Amy wrote: > I was recently asked to sign an agreement that would designate a Flex > project as "Work for Hire." I.e. I would not retain any ownership of > the code I wrote for the project. This seems to defeat the purpose of > OOP, if I create a whole body of code that I can't then reuse. How do > most Flex developers handle the idea of Work for Hire?
The company probably has two main concerns: 1. They want the source code so the program can be maintained, even if you get hit by a truck. 2. They don't want you to turn around and use your (sorry--their) code in a competing program. As a rule, they really don't care if you develop a really cool class to, say, display text in multiple languages, then add that to your bag of tricks. All programmers develop a library of reusable code, OOP or otherwise, over the years. And, in practical terms, there is little a company can do to keep you from re-using snippets of code, or whole objects. It's just algorithms and data, after all. Change a few variable and function names, perhaps rearrange functionality into new methods, and you have new code. On the other hand, if you write a cool 3-D snowboarding game, then turn around and repurpose the code for a competitor's skateboarding game, you have a problem (legal and ethical). My general rule is fine, the company owns the code, and can do what they want with it. On the other hand, I'm not going to re-invent the wheel every time I need to parse a string, so I re-use code and algorithms from other projects all the time. In fact, there's hardly a program I've written in the past 25 years that didn't draw on my prior experience. It would be foolish to do otherwise. Cordially, Kerry Thompson
