On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 10:13:27AM -0400, Anuradha Ratnaweera wrote:
> Before working for a commercial organization, one usually has to sign a
> contract which makes all the work done during the period of employment
> (including innovations, "hobby" coding done during "after hours")
> copyrighted by the employer. This introduces various problems when one
> wishes to do open source development, especially as a hobby.
Unless you are someone that sticks out from the crowd of engineers, you
are basically in trouble. If your employer can't easily replace you
then you can negotiate a different employee contract. This is quite
common for a certain level of engineers. I've done it and it is not
easy but one tip: describe the open source work as "pro bono work
for the community at large" and at least the lawyers will have a clue,
that's more or less their idea of open source.
-- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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