On 7/6/05, Baker, Tony <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Uh... Weldon Washburn, individual contributor, just tipped his hand. As an individual contributor, why would you need permission?
Speaking from my own past experience, I had to clear code contributions with an ex-employer which was in a similar but not identical market space as the FOSS project I was contributing to. My ex-employer was a Big 10 consulting firm with a proprietary OO framework in Forte 4GL, and I was contributing to a FOSS Java web framework.
In that instance, they were concerned I would leech intangible intellectual property from their proprietary framework, such as patterns or idioms. But they were full of it: their framework used GoF and Portland Patterns Group patterns, which everyone else in OO-development was also using, and which I knew of before I started working for them.
Some employers go even further and won't allow employees to make code contributions to projects governed by licenses that explicitly require derivative works to be released under the same license (i.e. they allow contributions to Apache-/MIT-/BSD-licensed projects, but discourage contributions to GPL/LGPL projects.) I haven't had an employer that imposed this restriction, so I don't know what their rationale is (it sounds like hogwash to me, but WTH do I know ...)
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