Re: [VAC] June 9 - August 30 [UPDATE]
On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 12:15:10AM +0200, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo <jsogo@debian.org> was heard to say:
> El día 30 jun 2003, Daniel Burrows escribía:
> > Just an update--
> >
> > As I mentioned previously, I am working for NASA over the summer. The
> > contract they gave me assigns copyright to any computer code I write
> > this summer to NASA; since it's only for 2.5 months, I didn't bother
>
> WHAAAAAT???
>
> I could understan this if you write that code in NASA computers
> (though only in part), but if you write that in your home and that's
> legal, I honestly think that you need to change your country in more
> things than I thought before.
I think that's pretty standard in employment contracts these days. My
impression is that the broad language is mostly due to laziness (both of
the employer, who obviously benefits from spending less time working out
the details of who-owns-what, and of the average employee, who isn't
going to complain about it)
My contract with Penn State originally had a similar clause, but I
made a fuss until they wrote an amendment exempting non-PSU projects. I
didn't feel like going to the trouble here, since it's just for the
summer. (also, I should probably get away from the computer and explore
San Fransisco from time to time :) )
Theoretically, of course, code from both places should be
public-domain, but my trust in public institutions is not at an all-time
high, especially at NASA, where a lot of code is t0P-5ekr3t due to
"security concerns", export control, etc. Obviously, nothing I'd work
on for Debian would be particularly classified, but the knee-jerk
reaction here seems to be to control information unless there's a good
reason not to.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. |
\---- News without the $$ -- National Public Radio -- http://www.npr.org ----/
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