The premise as you elaborated on my behalf, that they buy what you sell them, is correct. However I am willing to bet that 80 percent of the people on the list doing consulting work for open source customers aren't establishing a written scope/statement of work, don't retain rights to their work product or don't use any language of any sort to cover off these types of things.
In my job I write batch files, vb script, _javascript_, lotus script, @formula language code, and so on and so forth.
I have nothing in writing that says I own any of the product (this doesn't prevent me from keeping it stashed away) strictly for a cmya situation.
Since I work here and get paid to work here the product I generate will remain, legally, my employer's after I am gone.
Weather I quit, get fired, "right sized" (my personal fav) or die. It's still theirs because I took the paycheque at the end of the week.
Now if I wanted to write all that language into a binding doc that says all that work product is mine I would have a licence agreement of some sort with my customer (in this case my employer) however I would be defeating the purpose of selling them an open source solution.
You can buy a server that does a whole bunch of stuff out of the box w/ support and a warranty from a whole bivy of suppliers. Dell, IBM, HP and the like.
The whole point (in my humble opinion) of selling someone a standard pc with linux as a server is to keep costs down for them. I am trying to do right by me
(aka: earn a living) and right by my customer (aka: keep it cheap for them) In truth, I just don't have the time, the energy or the money to be bothered with trying to maintain some legal trail that in most cases company's that get hosed for their IP don't even sue because they have to be focused on keeping up w/ the technology.
I like this job, it's flexible. I get up in the morning looking forward to coming in to it. I am content to be the "on the side consultant" defender of el-cheapo guy that just wants it to work.
Huge tangent,
in short I don't want to licence jack, or worry about it. It's open source under the GPL because people see "value" in that concept not "profit" under other licensed models.
Hope this clarified it.
Shawn
| Sinner from the Prairy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 06/25/2003 02:33 PM
|
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Re: Novell jumps into Linux |
On Wednesday 25 June 2003 02:23 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Actually,
> In the world of IP (In this case that's intellectual property) if you were
> **paid** to write the script!
What blocks you from getting paid to write a script?
> I love it when I get paid!
Me too.
> Then the script actually belongs to the person who paid you to do the
> work.
Not exactly. The scripts belongs to whoever you decide in your agreement with
your employer. You cand ecide to, for example, license it to your employer
and retain rights to it. Or license it under dual license, like MySQL, for
example.
> They don't just buy the time it took you, or the outcome. They bought the
> means to the end.
They buy whatever you sell them.
> Where you have a case against is if they try to profit from or distribute
> that property without your permission.
That can also be covered by the license/agreement/contract/ All is flexible.
> That's when you get into software licensing which is sort of the whole
> opposite of Open Source.
Mmmm. I'm not sure that I understand what you are trying to say with this
sentence. Can you re-phrase it, please?
> Shawn
Salut,
Sinner
--
Stallman Reads my Tutorials! http://www.ibiblio.org/sinner/Steel/rms.html
Running on Mandrake Linux 9.0 - Kernel 2.4.19smp Linux User # 89976
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