[PLUG] Open source and professional employees

[Eric Jahn]

very interesting topic. so the lesson I gleaned was (as what New York
would call a "professional employee") make sure your job description is
as narrow as possible and does not overlap with your open source
software development, moonlighting, or hobbies.  I wonder what happens
if you don't have a job description?   

-----Original Message-----
From: Curtis Poe [mailto:cp at onsitetech.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 12:31 PM
To: plug at lists.pdxlinux.org
Subject: [PLUG] Open source and professional employees


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


_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug