State Trooper Fights For His Source Code

BarneyRabble writes to tell us that a Wisconsin State Trooper is fighting to maintain control of the source code for a program he wrote that helps officers write traffic tickets electronically. Praised by the state just 18 months ago, Trooper David Meredith is now suing the head of patrol claiming that the state is trying to illegally seize the source that he had developed on his own time. From the article: "Meredith, of Oconto Falls, defied an order from his bosses to relinquish the source code - the heart of the program - in October and instead deposited it with Dane County Circuit Judge David T. Flanagan, pending a ruling on who should control it. The case centers on how the software was developed. Department of Transportation attorney Mike Kernats said the State Patrol - a division of DOT - provided Meredith with a computer to write the software and gave him time off patrol duties so he could do the work. But Meredith said in court filings that he spent hundreds of hours off duty working on it, developing it almost entirely on his own time. He noted that he never signed a software licensing agreement."

Comments

Always clear this with your boss...

[Qubit]

The trooper's program is not FOSS, but I believe that the FSF's advice to Free Software developers who work for universities is appropriate:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/university.html

Whatever you do, raise the issue early -- certainly before the program is half finished. At this point, the university still needs you, so you can play hardball: tell the administration you will finish the program, make it usable, if they have agreed in writing to make it free software...

Work out the arrangement with the sponsor first, then politely show the university administration that it is not open to renegotiation. They would rather have a contract to develop free software than no contract at all, so they will most likely go along.

I work for a university, and I have explicitly talked to both the senior programmer and to our boss about developing FOSS on my own time (Do it both in person and over email -- so you have a record of the conversation).
If you write computer code and want to make sure that your company/university does not try to take it from you, you need to have that conversation. Send an email today!

Re:He didn't sign any agreement...

[k12linux]

All sorts of problems with this reasoning:

1. He didn't write it from scratch. He took code given to WI from IA and modified it. Trying to sell it as his own would make him guilty of copyright violation.
2. If he doesn't acknowledge any kind of license then he has NO rights to use someone else's source code in "his" software.
3. There IS a license for the code he based his work on... the one from IA saying it couldn't be sold commercially. Either he accepts that or he has no right to make a derivative work out of it. Regardless, the license wasn't with him it was with the state.
4. It is not legal (in WI anyhow) to profit or operate a business using public assets (the PC he was given to use.) If he wanted to start his own software business he should have bought his own PC.... and written the code all from scratch.
5. And as others have mentioned, he was given time (and paid) to work on the software. If he needed more time he should have told someone. This code is "work for hire" programming and decidedly not his.

He MAY be able to recover pay (even overtime) if he can show his superiors knew or should have known about the time he spent on it. I can't see him getting anything else. He's never going to be making millions off that software.

He could always destroy the source code instead of giving it to the state... and risk being sent to jail for a computer crime.

Re:Resources

[stevew]

When you read the article - it says he did "almost" all the development on this own time. As soon as that "almost" creeps in there, the state can correctly argue that they paid for part of the development. That is the opening they need to gain at least partial ownership of the program. Because of that and the state providing him training to learn how to connect to the Tracs system - me thinks this isn't a slam dunk for the officer.

In CA (as has been mentioned MANY times before on slashdot) there is a specific law stating that what is developed by an employee on the employee's own time belongs to the employee as long as there was no company resources were used. The officer wouldn't be able to claim that as described by the officer even in a state that has such specific provisions in their own state codes.

I wish him luck - but I suspect the state is going to win this one.