Hey All, As many of us do -- I have a few groups that I do work with that occasionally want me to help them with some work on their website. One such group works with an out of state Vendor that has locked them in pretty tight, developing everything "in their cms" that is proprietary and closed source. From my past experience as a consultant doing web-work, as well as taking over contracts of over consultants (and losing a few), as well as my limited experience with media organizations in Vermont -- what is the prevalence towards the attitude towards ownership of the work-for-hire of both design and application development?
Is it standard for closed-source inhouse-developed CMS vendors to say "you cant access any code we've developed"? Is it standard for vendors to say "we made it we own it" in terms of content, assets (flash, pdf, etc), and design? Is it standard for full-custom code (in PHP, Python, etc) to be fully licensed to the customer and changes to the source allowed without distribution rights? My belief was that most companies provided a royalty free, perpetual, and source license to their cms products. Specifically this belief was enforced by attending the Montpelier Vermont website selection committee in which the three vendors who were finalists all said their products were the property (whenever possible) of the client. The exception to this (taht seems ok) would be someone selling a sourced based framework/toolkit in which a site is deevloped on (ie, a website developed on an ASP.NET platform with Microsoft's toolkit), or otherwise commercially available and supported system that is documented and is decoupled from the work-for-hire. Thoughts? Experiences? I know we have a few developers on this list (*cough*) who can contact me off list as well if they prefer. Stan
