At 12:41 PM 3/24/2005, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: >I've proposed asking that a CCLA be required from everyone with an employer >specifically to protect the employee as well as the ASF, to prevent >accidentally (or intentionally) submarining IP into a project.
There is an additional theory I'll relate as heresay, IANAL, but to limit the unwanted spread of trade secrets, intellectual property etc requires adequate supervision by the employer. I'd be fascinated to see any case law, but one could argue that open source contributions are one of the (technically) most transparent external activities one can engage in outside of one's employer. An engineer moonlighting for another firm would be totally outside the view of one's employer. But anyone can see one's public activities on the internet. <me>googles "Geir Magnusson" and chuckles</me> It seems counterproductive to require a CCLA. If it is a malicious contribution, we can deflect the onus back on the employee, and ultimately on the owner of the intellectual property if they were party to 'submarining' our code base. Their claim to own code they 'planted' in our code base would (IMHO) be laughable. It's sort of like leaving a $20 bill on the table at McDonalds, and leaving the establishment. Your 'ownership' of that $20 bill becomes most dubious. The real risk is an employee who doesn't understand their employment contract, and doesn't know to see a CCLA based on their employment contract, state law, and their Employer's awareness / complicity in their open source participation. The most dangerous situation is a jurisdiction in which the Employer owns all IP the employee creates, and was never made aware of the employee's participation. So perhaps modifying the CLA to point out that these situations can lead to problems, remind them they are asserting they have the legal right to grant their code submissions, and point them to the CCLA if the situation is either ambiguous or if they explicitly do not have such rights. There's a second side effect, assuming we must have a CCLA from every employer opens the ASF to huge issues today. There is no reason to go that far overboard, IMHO. Bill <IANAL> Rowe --------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: Discussions on this list are informational and educational only, are not privileged and do not constitute legal advice. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
