> In my experience, in the US it's pretty standard for contracts to > say that anything you as an employee/contractor write for the > company becomes property of the company.
I think if you are a good developer who regularly produces reusable code you would run into serious problems if you regularly sign this sort of contracts since it is really difficult to reinvent the wheel all the time (I was never employed but at least for independent consultants this is critical). With most projects I'm involved in I don't care about 60%-90% of the code since it is highly coupled to the problem domain of the client. But the remaining 10%-40% are reusable and I need to be able to reuse them myself. I could happily do without rights of use for those 60%-90%, but the problem is that contracts get signed before development starts and it is usually impossible to determine the reusable parts upfront. So in the end although I'm regularly presented with this sort of clause that the client owns all the code in the initial version of the contract I always negotiate to get it out (and succeeded in every single case so far). The final terms were always unlimited rights of use for both sides. If the client would not accept that I would either abstain from the project or charge a significantly higher rate. In most cases I consider this kind of clause inadequate anyway, since the advantage for the client often is so marginal compared to the disadvantage for the contractor. Often I'm part of a team and with the rights of use for the small part of the application that I own I couldn't just go and start selling the same project to other clients anyway, and this, in most cases, is the only scenario the clients usually (rightfully) want to protect themselves against. (Note that I'm living and working in Germany, don't know about the situation in other countries). Jens Halm Spicefactory _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
