On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 23:19, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:21:37PM -0400, Paul Smith wrote: --snip-- > > I think you're missing Alex's point. He was not saying it was bad that > > he couldn't take the code he wrote for some company and do anything he > > wanted with it (at least that's not what I think he was saying). > > He's saying that, even though he no longer has that code anymore, if he > > were to rewrite, from scratch, without referencing the old code, > > something that did the same thing, his employer would have a case about > > it. > > I agree that rewriting from scratch should be ok. At first he was saying > that if he wrote a program that reused the library he wrote for them, > that that would make his whole program illegal or something. Later he > mentionned rewriting in perl (and that maybe it might still be a > problem).
What I meant to say was that if I re-wrote that same library from scratch without any major changes, and then used it, it could potentially make the entire application illegal. Of course, removing it would fix that problem in all likelyhood. Unfortunately, the case with the Linux kernel isn't nearly so simple. Someone else mentioned that if I re-implemented it in another language I would be ok, so I guess that rewriting in Perl wouldn't expose me to any negative repercussions. > Of course there are. They protect the person from writing similar > software but they don't allow them to use the code they've written for > their employer without the employer's consent. There are some extremely restrictive, but hopefully unenforceable, contract clauses out there which claim ownership of ALL code produced while employed by that company, whether it's for company use or not. If I happen to go home and contribute code to the Linux kernel one night after work, my employer could now claim that Linux was infringing on its intellectual property rights. Scary eh? Thankfully, I've never heard of anyone even TRYING to enforce a clause such as this, much less succeed. Though I have personally SEEN the clause on a number of occasions. p.s. This list goes to my primary mailbox, so no need to CC me on replies. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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