Hi porkchop, I was handling the OSS licensing at my previoys job, so I am somewhat familiar with the scenario you describe.
As long as your code is not repackaging anything written by others, you are free to license it any way you want, including an OSS license. Specifically, just because you invoke proprietary code has no impact on the license of the code you are writing. You cannot copyright a line that says retcode = foo.bar(baz) if that line is the recommended way to invoke this method. Here, the code is written by a contractor, so you have to make sure the contractor releases the copyright to you. By default, the employer automatically gets the copyright of any for-hire work, so unless you entered into a special agreement when you hired that Cacti developer, there shouldn't be any issue. Hope it helps. --Fred On Wed, 19 Mar 2014 11:35:26 -0400 "Michael Kaegler - [email protected]" <mhvlug2.trace.4cba8fd3ab.michael#[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everybody! Long time no see! > > I'm working down in Maryland these days, having quite an interesting > time of late. I run the corporate networks... WAN, LAN, SAN, etc. > We've recently picked up an IBM product called the XIV (2812-214). > Its a disk array which is essentially a rack with a few UPSs and 6-15 > linux boxes with hard drives in the front, fiberchannel/iscsi in the > back, infiniband in between, and loads of custom software to make it > all tick. > > I've been using Cacti forever, and so I've gone and contracted with > one of the Cacti developers to make a plugin to help us keep track of > the disk pools, performance stats... a good investment since we like > to overprovision storage. I want to take this code and release it > back into the cacti/open source community. > > Here's the rub: > $BOSS wants to make sure that we're not violating any IBM licenses > etc. I've reviewed the NDA and International Program License > Agreement (to my knowledge the only relevant documents) to ensure > that this is kosher, and see no problems... IANAL. > > We're not talking about repackaging any IBM-authored code here! This > code uses IBM software ("xcli" which we are not repackaging) to > connect to the disk array, make a few requests, then parse the output. > > The question: > Does anyone in this IBM-heavy community filled with LTC engineers > know what I should do to ensure we're not knocking anything over? Has > anyone done something similar before? > > Thanks! > -porkchop _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org https://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Apr 2 - Nginx: High-Performance HTTP Server, Reverse Proxy, and IMAP/POP3 Proxy Server May 7 - Google App Engine Jun 4 - Samba: Can We All Just Get Along?
