On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Nicolas Costes wrote:
You need to deeply discuss those facts with the company, and why not try to secure the vservers' future in the job contract... My english is too bad when it comes to that domain, but I can try to say it like this: "I agree to work for you if you agree to support vservers developpement, instead of trying to make them disappear, ie. use and promote the vservers technology in your products, and respect the GPL".
That'd be all water under the bridge, since ultimately a corporation is to serve its stockholders regardless of what any officer of the corporation may say, even if it is truly spoken from the heart.
The key thing is the holder of the copyright. And a typical employment agreement usually states that whatever work you do is actually owned by the company (regardless whether you do it in your spare time). And whoever owns the copyright can govern the project in whichever direction possible, even make part or all of it closed-source. I do not mean to say that this is what's going to happen, but it's a possibility nonetheless.
Therefore the ideal situation is when the copyright is owned by a separate corporate entity, usually a not-for-profit, formed with a charter to specifically to support the project. Some good examples are the ASF (apache), Mozilla Foundation, OSDL, PSF, etc, etc. These organizations have no other interests, are not there to make money and cannot be easily intimidated legally or otherwise. There is a good reason why all these foundations exist in today's world of SCO and the like.
Grisha _______________________________________________ Vserver mailing list Vserver@list.linux-vserver.org http://list.linux-vserver.org/mailman/listinfo/vserver
