On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:21:37PM -0400, Paul Smith wrote: > %% Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com> writes: > > bs> This makes a lot of sense. I mean if the FSF hired you to write a > bs> GPL program, they wouldn't want you to release a proprietary > bs> version of it after you quit working for them. > > Actually this would not be a problem since the FSF never "hires" anyone > to write code with that kind of employment contract. Whenever you write > GNU code it's always copyright to you: before the FSF will accept it as > part of GNU you must assign copyright to them. _BUT_, when you do they > always give you back a license to use the code in any way you wish, > including incorporating it into other, proprietary programs or releasing > it under other licenses. As I said in another message, at least for some packages (emacs and gcc) it is the FSF's stated position that they want copyright assignments or code in the public domain. I don't know anything further than that about the matter. > Regardless, as long as you rewrote it from scratch, without copying the > GPL'd code, then it's not copyright infringement. The problem is > _PROVING_ you wrote it from scratch. If you've been exposed to the code > and your code comes out looking the same then there's an assumption that > you've (at least subconciously) copied the code. Only if you can show > you've never been exposed to the original are you safe. I agree that that is a problem. > bs> Or another example, Microsoft has said they will stop supporting > bs> outlook express. It's dead and gone. Now imagine all the guys who > bs> worked on it decided to GPL the program. > > I think you're missing Alex's point. He was not saying it was bad that > he couldn't take the code he wrote for some company and do anything he > wanted with it (at least that's not what I think he was saying). > He's saying that, even though he no longer has that code anymore, if he > were to rewrite, from scratch, without referencing the old code, > something that did the same thing, his employer would have a case about > it. I agree that rewriting from scratch should be ok. At first he was saying that if he wrote a program that reused the library he wrote for them, that that would make his whole program illegal or something. Later he mentionned rewriting in perl (and that maybe it might still be a problem). > Note that in the U.S., at least, there are laws protecting people > related to this: there's an expiration on this kind of thing. > Otherwise, you could never switch jobs to another employer in the same > field of computing and work on similar systems, because you'd be > infringing on your original employer's copyright! Of course there are. They protect the person from writing similar software but they don't allow them to use the code they've written for their employer without the employer's consent. Bijan
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