In a situation where code ownership was not mentioned and no contracts were signed who would you assume owns the code? The company or the freelancer? If it was taken to court is there some kind of legal precedent where it goes to one party if nothing was said? ...
Besides open-sourcing your project and legislation, are there ways to prevent, or at least minimize the damages of code leaking outside your company/group? We obviously can't block Internet access (to prevent emailing the code) because programmer's need their references. We also can't block peripheral devices (USB, Firewire, etc.) The ...
I just finished a game for a certain mobile device. I'm just entertaining the idea of copyrighting my work. How does one do this? I really have no idea so any help is great! A friend who has some patents said that "you automatically own the copyright to anything original that you create." hmm not sure about this. note: I support O...
I have always included clauses to transfer to my clients full author, ownership and use rights for all the source code, original images, original resources, etc. I develop/create for them. Of course, I retain author, ownership and use rights for my libraries and I usually do not include source code for those. If the client requires my l...
A strong Agile concept is Joint Code Ownership - no single member of the team owns a piece of code, but rather the entire team. This means the code is up for editing, improvement, refactoring... How do you promote this concept? How do you deal with a team member that has trust issues regarding his code, and remains suspicious of other p...
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...
I have a copyright section in the contract I give to my clients stating that I retain copyright on any works produced during my work for them as an independent contractor. This is most definitely not intended to place arbitrary restrictions on my clients, but rather to maintain my ability to decide on how the software I create is license...
hey guys in the context of freelance programming (for the web), how do you calculate the cost and ownership of the source code. So, say I'm working on a project for a client, and I've worked how long the project might take, and what my hourly/project rates are going to be. Is it fair and/or normal to not include the source code as par...
We are in a project with a dozen members, working on some fairly cutting edge stuff, and want to work out a good approach to code ownership. On the one hand you always want at least two people familiar with any area ("common code ownership"), but there are countervailing advantages to having a single person in charge of an area to give ...
I am working on a contract (in USA) where I will become an employee of a company and provide them with a software solution for their operation. In the contract it is clearly indicated that I am building an application which all codes are owned by me and copyright is under my name and the employer is licensed to use the technology and has...
Long ago, I released a Visual C++ CPing class on codeguru. It was a really long time ago and the class demonstrated my lack of experience at the time, honestly. Some time later, I did a search for my CPing class on google out of curiosity. While my article did come up, another page came up as well. I'd posted the lame class and forgo...
I was originally hired at the company that I currently work at in a SysAdmin\ Software Support Role. My responsibilities eventually morphed into me spending most of my time writing small applications for the company's internal use and for some customers, (although none of this was put in writing). My question is do I retain any rights t...
If not specifically spelled out in any contract language, who would own the source code and the subsequent program developed? the programmer the company employing the programmer or the company who is the end-user customer paying for the development of the program by the company employing the programmer? ...
While I plan on asking at work to see if there is an official policy, I wonder in general. If you're working on a non-work application on a work computer, who owns that application? Work, or you? ...
Im involved with an academic software project in which 2 half-time PhD students manage 4-8 students. Turnover in this project is high, because students join for their 10 weeks Bachelors thesis or six month Masters thesis, then graduate and are gone forever. Each thesis usually involves the development of a new feature and while we stres...
I'm building a library from methods that I've found on the internet. Some are free to use or modify with no requirements, others say that if I leave a comment in the code it's okay to use, others say when I use the code I have to attribute the use of someone's code in my application (in the credits for my app I guess). What I've been do...