On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 07:51:00PM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote: > On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 19:36, Bill Moseley wrote: > --snip > > I assume most here agree it's absurd to think you can't have "free" > > software? Isn't that what SCO is now claiming, that US copyright law > > "supercedes(sic) the GPL" -- so you can't write "free" software? > > Welcome to the wonderful world of 'intellectual property' in the US. As > an example here: > > My previous employer had a contract provision that stated that any and > all code I write while employed there was owned by the corporation. One > of the things I wrote there was a library for Visual Basic (I couldn't > help it! They made me do it! May RMS have mercy on my soul! :) which > would parse a text box for numbers and arithmetic symbols and perform > the appropriate calculations on it. No one else so much as contributed a > comment to this code other than myself. > > Now, if for some reason, unfathomable as it may seem, I choose to write > a program in VB again and I use the same code that I used in the > library, and then release the program under the GPL, I would be in > violation of my previous employer's intellectual property rights and > would, therefore, risk making my entire program 'illegal'. This makes a lot of sense. I mean if the FSF hired you to write a GPL program, they wouldn't want you to release a proprietary version of it after you quit working for them. Or another example, Microsoft has said they will stop supporting outlook express. It's dead and gone. Now imagine all the guys who worked on it decided to GPL the program. I mean if copyright law allowed that we woulnd't need a Free Software Foundation. We could just Free all the software in the world through hopeful thinking. What's more extreme is the view that *any code* you write while being employed by them is their property. Even code you write in your spare time. I mean I think to some extent this can be defended especially if it's in the same field. Because you could slack off on your real work and do your version of the thing on the side for profit. Example the guys working at ebay start their own auction site (in direct competition with ebay) on the side and spend their spare time working on that. How moral is that? I mean that doesn't even have to do with copyright so much as common sense. I mean copyright law may be evil, but at least it's consistent. (It looks out for the rich guys hiring people to write software.) Bijan
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