[PLUG] Open source and professional employees

Curtis Poe cp at onsitetech.com
Wed Mar 20 20:30:38 UTC 2002


If you do any sort of Open Source development and you have a signed
employment contract, you may wish to read this:

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=153046

I know the author and he and I have spoken at length about this issue.
Legally, his company has him over a barrel.  It turns out that neither the
GPL nor Perl's Artistic license protects him because an employee usually has
no legal right to unilaterally bind his or her employer to such restrictive
terms without the employer's explicit, written permission.

Unfortunately, all of the open-source work he has produced during his
current employment has the potential to be pulled.  If you use Perl, you may
wish to be aware that both the Carp and Exporter modules may be forced to
revert to older, broken versions.

Further, he was developing some rather revolutionary ideas for regular
expression engines which may now never see the light as he will likely be
sued if he continues to work on them.

Cheers,
Curtis "Ovid" Poe
--
"Ovid" on http://www.perlmonks.org/
Someone asked me how to count to 10 in Perl:
push at A,$_ for reverse q.e...q.n.;for(@A){$_=unpack(q|c|,$_);@a=split//;
shift at a;shift at a if $a[$[]eq$[;$_=join q||, at a};print $_,$/for reverse @A





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