Hi Polytropon, cc questions@ (No CC Wojciech P. as my local filters drop text from him )
> To translate this to a programmer's job: > > You're being paid to write a program for a customer. You > deliver the program. That's what you are paid for. Still > the source code is yours (as _you_ are the creator, no > matter who you sold "a copy" to). So I would assume that > you can still use the program for further projects that > run independently from that customer. > > EXCEPT - of course, there is a contract specifying otherwise. There's often legal (copyright, patents, etc) discussions on FreeBSD lists, maybe we should have a le...@freebsd.org list on http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo There's 193 countries in the United Nations http://www.un.org/en/members/growth.shtml Some have different laws even within one country: In UK, England & Scotland have different contract law: http://www.inhouselawyer.co.uk/index.php/scotland-home/8094-scots-and-english-contract-law-false-friends Decades back USA employees by default retained more patent &/or maybe copyright rights than UK employees. In UK by default it went to employer. But if a USA employer put a clause in to over- ride the default ? ... IANAL = I Am Not A Lawyer etc. German employee law I don't know. I've always been freelance. Tip: Often mentioning the idea at the beginnning of contracts, technical project directors are happy to ask their legal dept. to add a simple clause they draft themselves along the lines of eg: Customer has exclusive rights to code written just for project. Programmer can keep & publish general code written or enhanced for general tools not exclusively for project. Customer can keep & use a copy of tools. Best to suggest such ideas at the beginning not end of projects. Cheers, Julian -- Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com Reply below not above, cumulative like a play script, & indent with "> ". Format: Plain text. Not HTML, multipart/alternative, base64, quoted-printable. Mail from @yahoo dumped @berklix. http://berklix.org/yahoo/ _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"