[TriLUG] Clarification on my first opinion.

[STaylor at srspos.com]

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, java script, 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 <sinner at escomposlinux.org>
Sent by: trilug-admin at trilug.org
06/25/2003 02:33 PM
Please respond to trilug

 
        To:     trilug at trilug.org
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: [TriLUG] Re:  Novell jumps into Linux


On Wednesday 25 June 2003 02:23 pm, STaylor at srspos.com 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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