On 7 July 2014 21:46, FRIGN <d...@frign.de> wrote: > 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.
Well we might accept Google contributions (with Google Inc's copyright notice) if the contributor proves the contribution with a written and signed consent by some Google board member at the very least. Otherwise it would always remain an individual contribution (I wouldn't mind the @google.com email address though). For smaller company-contributions things might be a lot easier of course ;) Best regards, Anselm
