Jim Klimov wrote:
2010-11-04 8:11, Darren Reed wrote:
Oracle has no problems with me doing it but would own all of the
intellectual property (i.e copyright) for all of the work that I
would do.
*I* have a problem with that given that I would be doing it on my
time and it would be me handing out freebies to a very wealthy
man/company.
And, if that's not a secret, can you shed some light on such question
as how did it work with Sun?
From certain perspectives, it would appear that Sun (as a company)
valued its employees in a vastly different way than what Oracle (as a
company) does.
For example, at Sun there were posters around the building that pointed
out that the company's greatest asset was you (the employee.) At Oracle
we have "building police" that remove electrical appliances (such as bar
fridges that belong to employees) from offices because they are not
"Oracle approved" (of course this could be normal and that at Sun the
atmosphere was much more relaxed.) The Oracle mail server is called "the
bee hive" - you can make up your own analogies on that one.
As a result of that, Sun was much more accomodating to its employees and
thus at the time of employment Sun was open to reviewing changes to the
standard employment contract.
They did not claim any copyright on *your* work, and simply forked an
ipfilter (like anyone else can) to which they might have such rights?
Something like that, yes, where Sun held the copyright to changes that
Sun made.
And on the opposite, can't you maintain IPFilter as a part of your
paid job - albeit IP (to these patches) would now belong to Oracle?
I could, yes.
Or would that possibly threaten the open-source project? They can't
change the license to code that existed and was in the open before you
even worked for Sun, right?
So what would happen is that over the course of a year or two, IPFilter
would evolve, along with patches, to become a thing that was owned by
Oracle unless you stripped away all of the patches, etc, that bore the
Oracle copyright to dig down to the "Darren Reed" copyright. That feels
wrong in some very basic way that I'm not sure I can explain.
Darren
