Tarus, I think you have a clear advantage since you are incorporated, and contracting yourself out. I believe it's tougher for those of us who are individually, and without incorporation, job hunting the body shops.
>>my point exactly. I don't believe there are no benefits to incorporation as one person says, when there are people doing it all over the place, and my accountant tells me to the contrary. The typical document I've run into isn't as all-encompassing as Marc M. spoke of: >>THANK GOD! Well what I THINK I am finding out, is, that when you are corp they HAVE to respect you - whether they do as a person or not! Because it changes the relationship from the traditional paternalistic 'shut up and play by the rules' to a corp contracting with another corp, as say for any other type of service (lawn, moving, janitorial whatever). That is my suspicion. It has been validated somewhat by the fact that the papers NOW coming from the recruiter aren't NEARLY as bad as they were for W2. And their W2 arrangement had no bennies anyway, just a good hourly rate which is also higher as contract, :) so no love lost there... I (and I figure, most of us on the list) normally apply for traditional system administration positions in which neither the employer nor I expect to be writing something extensive or original enough to merit ownership. The last document like this that I signed covered only work done while in the employ of the company, and done on company resources. They didn't push a non-compete clause or care what I did outside work. >>That's very humble of you. However in a court of law or even when signing a document, (especially the one I mentioned) -- *ANY* editing, scripting, writing of applets, etc., *COULD* be construed as 'works' for the company to own, not you. You don't have to write JACK for it to merit THEIR ownership! This is a contract that wanted to own ALL FUTURE SOFTWARE!!!! This could be a problem later if you wanted to write a systems admin book and include your favorite backup script that you have used at the last 3 employers prior to this one (couldn't use it afterwards, right?). See what I mean? It is getting more restrictive if you give in. Sure, I agree, you probably aren't gonna get sued over this stuff, at least not in a timely manner, but it's the principle of the thing! How much of your future are you willing to sell off? :) The one time I did run into this problem, it was with a headhunting firm wanting to farm me out to another company. They used the much more restrictive language, much like Marc M spoke about earlier. I attempted to modify and they just "went away", ending communications with no further progress on the deal. >> this scenario sucks b/c it seems like you have come so close to a great thing. But as so many others have pointed out a great thing isn't always what it appears to be. If they are that big of jerks then they aren't work **** and that is a beautiful thing to know up front. Now when that happens to me, I thank them for showing me their true colors! Fortunately for myself, later on I found that this wasn't a firm I wanted to be associated with anyway. Seems that the entities pushing the more draconian language (that likely wouldn't hold up in court) are somewhat "grey" and skirting the ethical borders of business anyway. >>but aren't there a lot more of those types of businesses around these days? Or maybe the business climate has just seemed poisoned by the Enrons et al. However, I'll bet there are plenty of companies in the US employing skilled admins or programmers to write code based on GPL'ed software who think they own it, but in fact do not. Whether anyone cares or not probably doesn't surface until a legal conflict results. >>I completely agree. I am looking forward to hearing stories coming out of LOTS of clueless companies doing things like this. The problem comes when non technical 'suits' run the show and make decisons on stuff like this. I believe that smarter organizations will promote people who are in the know, like programmers with many years of experience, that tends to help. Let them deploy 'their' new products, only to find out that it really isn't 'theirs'! JKB -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
