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Protecting Your Code While Allowing Source Access?
foo_48120 asks: "My small development shop, myself and four employees, is taking on a fairly large job that will run a substantial part of the clients business. To protect themselves they want the source code to the project. Frankly I don't blame them. We bid aggressively to get them to underwrite our own efforts to build this code, which we plan to resell again and again. That is the basis for our company.
I have no problem with them holding the source but need to make it clear that we own the code and that they have a license to use it in their business. They may at their discretion hire others to modify the code, but would still be required to pay their maintenance contract and be prohibited from reselling it or using it to run an additional business. How do you provide open source without escrow, yet protect what we are documenting up front as out intellectual property rights in the ownership of this code?"
Of course third party developers may break things and we would not be responsible for that or for fixing it without further renumeration.
Ideally, if we make them happy then we will do all future upgrades and add on modules as well. I am not worried about that. I do want to know if anyone has experience in the writing of such a licensing agreement? Perhaps they could provide me with a sample copy of their text?
Let's leave aside for now the issue of totally open source vs. closed source. There are times when you want the product to be proprietary as we do, however I want them to feel comfortable using our code so that if a proverbial plane were to fly into our building and wipe us all out then they don't go down the tubes with us."
Seriously, why are you even bothering to "Ask Slashdot?". This is a legal issue, you'll need legal contracts and agreements, all of that. Talk to a fucking lawyer.
:)
You clearly don't know the difference between what you talking to a lawyer costs, and what talking to the slashdot-crowd costs
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You just need to write an obfuscator then, something that takes the inhouse code and changes variable names and adds bogus modules and subroutines.
I know developers who do this part without really trying that hard...
"How do you provide open source without escrow, yet protect what we are documenting up front as out intellectual property rights in the ownership of this code?"
/. know-it-alls.
By hiring yourself a good lawyer.. and not taking law advice from a bunch of pimple-faced
-gerbik
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
GPL: The Guido Public License
Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the the Scarpelli family's Guido Public License gives you more freedom with the benefit of protection for you, your family and your business. The Guido Public License applies to most of the Scarpelli Family Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Scarpelli Family Software Foundation software is covered by the Guido Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too.
Accidents, fires and floods happen. The Guido Public License protects you.
We protect our rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy and distribute the software.
Failure to abide by the rules of any of the Guido Public Licenses will mean a visit from Guido Scarpelli himself.
You don't want that.
Trolling is a art,
Well, for one thing, the model of selling a product doesn't work in the software development industry.
I just heard a thunderclap. I think it was the sound of Bill Gates' bank account entering the atmosphere of your argument. I estimate about five minutes until it re-enacts the scene from the end of The Forge of God when it meets up with Scott McNealy's.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Well my past experience is this:
Go ahead and give them the code. When they start modifying it, taking it to 3rd parties, and using it at other businesses, stare at the ground and tremble your lower lip. That night, get into an argument with your wife and kick the dog.
Best Windows Freeware
...although bear in mind that a lawyer engaged in copulation may not have his/her mind completely on the job.
Not a problem - screwing is part of their job description.
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
-- Argel
Thats my job-security. Nonsensical variable names, meaningless functions etc... It would be a nightmare for even a very experienced programmer to decipher some of my source codes, especially for larger programs... So spaghettify the source code then give it to them. In 5 years when they figure it out it probably wont matter much by then, as it would be quicker just to re-write it from scratch.
-- Will program for bandwidth
of "Open Source" in a dictionary, making the exercise pointless, he is likely to find many other words in there.
.gasp, beautiful.
.or even have our code corrected by an outside party if that's what it takes to make beautiful code.
For instance, after modifying the code his firm is indeed likely to renumerate it, i.e., give it a different version number.
For doing this his firm will expect to be *remunerated.* It's from the Latin remuneratus, derived from munis, from which we also derive the English words "munificent" and even "money."
( Munis is a gift, to remunerate is to *re*gift, i.e., effect an exchange)
This note brought to you by the ever hated Slashdot Lexical Patrol ( also known as SLaP), who believes that language is form of code and believes code should be well formed, it's terminology and functions properly called and invoked and even. .
Our patron saint is William Strunk, Jr., along with his acolyte E.B. White and our Demigods include such figures as Gibbon, Thoreau, Conrad ( who managed in a "foriegn" language no less), Yeats, Voltaire and Kipling ( The OS booted up like thunder!).
Just as Knuth is ( and should be) venerated, so should geeks venerate and study the "code" of these honored figures.
We all write faulty code at times. It's no shame to have to debug and reversion. .
In fact, I rather imagine that some of the more ironically inclined are about to take a hearty whack at this missive itself.
KFG
--
Damn the Emperor!
an confidential inhouse one, and an obfuscated one to give to the company, full of misleading variables names, fake variables, incorrect subroutines, etc. Of course, they both compile correctly.
....OW..OW.OWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW! It's a joke! Stop hitting me!
so we convert it to perl then?
OW.. OW
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Write sloppy undocumented code that only your guys should understand :)
Running with Linux for over 5 years!
I hope thats on an iPAQ or something, a desktop or even a laptop would be kind of heavy to run with, especially for 5 years.
Why not fork?
I would suggest not using the ellipse so often ...
I believe you mean ellipsis. According to my dictionary, ellipse is a geometric figure.
If you're referring to the proliferation of "*" in the post, these are not ellipses. A "*" used as an ellipsis would indicate omission - as in "f*** you!". In the case of this post, the "*" is used for emphasis.
That said, I too find all the "*" annoying. And if anyone can tell me what name is for "*", I'd appreciate it.
...believes code should be well formed, it's terminology and functions properly called and invoked...
I would like to call your attention to the fact that the character sequence "it's" is a macro that is expanded by the preprocessor to the sequence "it is". Thus the sentence fragment above, once preprocessed, reads "...believes code should be well formed, it is terminology and functions properly called and invoked..." This bit of code, as it were, is clearly not well formed.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Asking Slashdot will likely generate a lot of dumb ideas that won't fly legally, but it also at times generates the occasional 5-Insightful that contains the idea that neither you nor your lawyer would have thought of.
/. should have been "-5 Dead Wrong".
Unfortunately, a large number of "5-Insightful" comments on
Voting is a lousy way to arrive at the truth.
A contract like that that can work -- if they know that you can and will have a lawyer sue them if they violate the agreement. (You don't have to make threats, just let them know that you have the resources to do so, and your lawyer isn't Clippy. "I notice that you're trying to sue someone...")
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If your nipples are below your ribcage, you have two possible solutions:
#1) You're a girl and need to investigate this amazing invention called a bra.
#2) You're a guy and should shoot yourself before you infect the rest of the gener pool.
As far as the software goes. Give it away and let them spread it around. After it get's sufficiently popular, file a patent on the idea and sue everyone using it. That seems to be the standard business model these days.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky