On 16 September 2005 04:31, Raphael Melo de Oliveira Bastos Sales wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I work with biotech and for about an 1 year I've been working on a > web interface for genome/proteome data analysis. And I'd like to make > it free software. But I still have doubts about legal problems I might > face and about intellectual property. > Basically, I don't want to restrict people on using and > contributing with source or whatever, but don't want anyone taking > credit for my work or pateting it and sending me a cease-and-desist > letter. > If anyone has any insight, references or links on this subject, > please let me know.
1. Step You make sure the stuff is your. So you stamp a copyright message all over it. Basically, you put a copyright notification in each and every file. Now you have made clear it is *your* intellectual property. 2. Step You have to put it under an OSS license that suits you best. I guess the two most widely used OSS licenses are the General Public License (GPL) and the BSD license. There are quite some differences between them. In a nutshell: The GPL does not allow to include any of your stuff in a piece of software that is not under the GPL. In other words, Whoever wants to build software based on yours has to make the result OSS under GPL as well. The BSD license basically allows any use of your software as long as the copyright remains unchanged (which prevents anyone from patenting it) and the result credits you. All that said, if someone with a lot of money grabs your stuff an - say - patents it you still have to challenge them in court which can take considerable time and money. The GPL has a slight advantage in this case because the Free Software Foundation (FSF) will help you legally. You should read through the available licenses even if they are a boring read. ;-) Uwe -- 95% of all programmers rate themselves among the top 5% of all software developers. - Linus Torvalds http://www.uwix.iway.na (last updated: 20.06.2004) -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
