NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Snyder]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Allen Shaw
<allen at twomiceandastrawberry.com> wrote:
>
> Naming the license in the contract seems easy enough.  Of course, if the
> (non-technical, consumer-minded) client holds the copyright, there is very
> little chance they'll be enforcing the terms of the license -- but even with
> that comment I'm approaching  "IANAL" territory, so I'll stop here.
>

I look at it from a practical angle: the reason why I want the code to
be licensed as open is so that I can reuse anything useful that I
write specifically for the client. I also believe it's the right thing
to do for other reasons, but that's beside the point.

They own the copyright, which makes them feel good. It "goes with the
flow" legally by not trying to change the rules of work for hire. As
far as I'm concerned, they can do whatever they want in the future,
including going proprietary with future code.

But at any point up to that change, I can legally and ethically
incorporate functional parts of the project into my own toolkit by
following the terms set forth in the license.

Remember, if the client has property that is being worked into the
project, such as trademarked artwork, licensed fonts, or third-party
libraries, you have to be careful to keep those things separate from
the open source codebase. This could mean keeping the project split
between two repositories, but in my experience those external things
are basically static and don't need to be versioned at all.

Let us know what your lawyer thinks, Allen.