What is the legal process for naming software products? We will be talking to lawyers at some point, but I'd like to know a little more about the process before spending a fortune on them. I realize that few, if any, people on here are lawyers, but if you've gone through any sort of legal process for naming your products, please share yo...
Are personal tools that were created by an employee of a company owned by the employee if they were not commissioned by the company he worked for? The scenario is as follows: The employee has long since left the company The tools have spread throughout the departments of the company The company does not have the source for the tools a...
My company is building an application that interoperates with a packaged application that our customers own. We don't have a good relationship with the package's vendor; they basically see us as competitors and wish we would die in a fire. My business partners are edgy about this, and have been suggesting that I remove all references t...
Previously asked as, this question, but now he actually asked the question. My company is building an application that interoperates with a packaged application that our customers own. We don't have a good relationship with the package's vendor; they basically see us as competitors and wish we would die in a fire. My business partners...
Keeping in mind that this is not a question on the ethics of software patents, What books or resources do you recommend for self-filing of patents? Or, do you have solid reasons for why one should not self-file and instead use an attorney? ...
I am developing a web application for a customer. We have agreed to a fee and now the customer wants me to hand over the source code as well because he thought that the initial fee covered him buying the source code from me as well as the app. What I am asking is: do you think that I should give the code to my client without asking for...
My startup is planning to work with a recommendation system developer company to improve our product. The only problem is, that they wouldn't like to give us the source code at the end of the project because of the unique algorithms implemented. We plan long-term co-operation with this team, but the recommendation engine is a core part ...
Is copying open source code considered legal in terms of license, forget about plagiarism? I have seen some codes is exactly the same as open source code, the only thing changed is the package name and the class name. Thank you ...
I am writing software that will be used ONLY internally in a corporate environment, and the company will never market the software or make it available outside it's own confines. If I use open source (i.e. GPL) code in my application, does the company have any obligation to release what I write? Or if it's never marketed can we keep th...
Have you used software/source code escrow before? What was your experience? Were you the developer or the client? Do you have any suggestions on choosing a provider? ...
BCL Specifically, am I breaking the EULA by doing this? ...
I work for a software / design firm and I recently found out that our "in house" CMS is actually MODx that has been re-skinned by one of our designers. MODx is licensed under the GPL Ver 2.. I would like to know if it is ethical / legal to be selling this to clients. We also offer another package that is actually ZenCart, is this legal...
I am looking for information about providing a license, or "terms of use", for a web application. The Wikipedia article is very limited, and it seems that unlike "downloadable" software (or perhaps "installable" software, for lack of a better term), for which there is much more information, not so much has been written specifically for t...
Is it legal to write instant message software that implements MSN Messener, Yahoo! Messener, or AIM protocols and receive money for it through ads? ...
How does the fair use doctrine apply to websites in terms of screen-scraping? The particular example I am thinking of is extraction of the useful data from a website, and re-presentation of the raw data aggregated with data from other similar websites. For example, suppose one was to extract data from a variety of websites to produce a ...
Following on from my question on the Legalities of screen scraping, even if it's illegal people will still try, so: What technical mechanisms can be employed to prevent or at least disincentivise screen scraping? Oh and just for grins and to make life difficult, it may well be nice to retain access for search engines. I may well be pla...
Background: I'm fresh out of school with only solo contract development while I was going to school, so I've never worked as a developer for a company. So I've applied for a position at a company as a (jr) software dev. I had the interview, it went well, references checked out and the company wants to hire me. Yay me! I get the employm...
I've been doing some research on game development. I'm a Bejeweled addict, and have been spending some time thinking about the algorithmic problems that had to be solved. Along the way I've noticed that there are tons of independently-developed (NOT by Popcap) Bejeweled clones. So, my question is: Do all these little development shops...
I'm working on an open-source project that I want to release under a permissive license, because it's a library, not an application and personally, I don't like copyleft for library code. If I were to browse through GPL code written in a different programming language just to get a general idea of how to do something, and then write a d...
Are there any ready-made license blocks for proprietary code? I have some part-completed code. Before I send it to anyone, I'd like to add a license block to the top of each file. I can find plenty of blocks for liberal licenses such as the MPL boilerplate, but I'd like something a little more restrictive, at least for now. Basically, ...