On Thu, Jun 03, 2004, Roger Barnes wrote: > If you learn a technique to _do_ something, then I think that is a > skill that belongs to you, in your head. (We might be entering the > evil, murky patent territory here, run for it!)
I don't think it's so much patents as this kind of scenario: you work for a closed source operating systems vendor. You develop some kind of nifty scheduling algorithm, your own idea but not an idea you could have had without knowledge you've gained because of your acquaintance with the code in the operating system you work on, and work team members have done. Can you then, on your own time and equipment, legally reimplement that functionality and contribute it to the Linux kernel? Even if your company does not patent it? Can you do this after you've resigned? This is the kind of grey area where many employers would like to claim your ideas as their intellectual property: it's your idea but based on their existing work. Many contracts I've seen will explicitly require you to sign this kind of IP over to avoid any confusion (at which point your reimplementation may become a violation of trade secret stuff), but this would conflict with your "my technique, my property" intuition. Employers like to control more than just the copyright of what you produce. There seem to be several approaches FOSS developers take here but mostly it seems to be: make it clear to relevant parties that you do outside software development (technical writing, whatever), and go through their conflict of interest procedures, formal or informal, and get something in writing; maintain a clear boundary between work hacking (OS scheduling) and home development (3D graphics); or get a contract that is clear and generous about what is and isn't your employer's property in the first place. -Mary -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
