On Mon, 7 Jul 2014 21:39:36 +0200 Anselm R Garbe <garb...@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 <d...@frign.de>
