Today I am very happy indeed. I checked the wording of my employment contract, and it turns out the company I work for DOES NOT have a clause claiming ownership of everything I do - therefore the intellectual property rights of the code I write is governed by literary copyright laws; meaning that anything I create in the course of my employment is owned by my employer - but anything I do outside of that is MINE.
It’s a huge relief. Even though the “complete ownership” clause is common for IT developers, I am very happy indeed that it isn’t specifically written in my contract. If it had been there, it would have effectively stopped me from helping with any open source projects without first getting permission from my employer.
So - I am free to write anything I like now (as long as there is no conflict of interest with the projects I develop in my day-job). There is one project I was starting to think about that will almost certainly have to be shelved until I can get agreement from work that it’s okay to look at - workflow. I want to write an open source workflow engine, but I do a lot of workflow stuff in my day job too.
I guess there are several thousand lines of code still to write in CMS too - what with all the plugins I want to write for it How do I manage to get involved in so many projects in my “spare” time ??
If you’re wondering who the picture is of today, it’s John Forbes Nash - the guy who virtually invented game theory, and promoted the idea that “if everybody helps everybody, everybody wins” - that’s my take on it by the way - he wrote it in much better terms than that… Open Source software is a good thing.
While talking to a colleague earlier about the IPR issue, we realised that if the “open source” movement had happened in the 1950s, the American Government would have put lots of American developers in jail… “everybody helping everybody” is a kind of communism in American eyes