On Mon, 7 Jul 2014 21:39:36 +0200
Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> IMHO I only came across such legal terms in a contract proposal by
> some US company, a couple of years ago.
> Apart from US companies I can't confirm that such contracts are common
> practice, particularly not under German law.
>
> Source code that is pretty much unrelated to your typical day job that
> is developed during non working hours, is typically not copyright of
> your employer as long as this is not stated explicitely -- and I
> wouldn't sign such a contract. Otherwise the tomatos that you harvest
> in the summer in your garden might also become property of your
> employer ;)
That's exactly what I wanted to state. Nothing to add here.
Only because America is a police state in regard to contracts, you
can't apply those internal contracts to international copyright law. In
case an employee wrongfully doesn't add his company's name to a
license, it won't magically imply the company's copyright. What it
would imply is the fact that the company has the right to file a
lawsuit and tell the employee to add the company-name to the license.
However, by that time, we would have reacted and removed all portions
of the contributed code from the project, effectively removing all
fangs a company can have on a source-code.
Regarding corporate-licenses in general, I was a bit unclear about the
terms: There's no issue with small firms or corporations contributing
to the suckless-cause, but very much when it comes to big international
ones like Google.
In my opinion, Google is at the same level as Microsoft when it comes
to software-freedom.
Cheers
FRIGN
--
FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de>
Received on Mon Jul 07 2014 - 21:46:01 CEST