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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."
I'm wondering if the fact that it may be a derivative work of Tracs could actually be a bigger issue. The article didn't make it clear whether he actually modified parts of Tracs or just wrote an interface to it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Better yet: Make sure you know who is going to own the code before you write it.
The police force should have never accepted the program without accompanying source code, or (worst case) some sort of license.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
In fact, in most cases if the work is any any way related to his work domain it's theirs even if they _didn't_ provide any resources, or at least they have a strong case to argue this.
He's wasting his time and the court's time, he can't win.
It's not that simple. Copyright law says a work-for-hire is "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment." Court cases have determined that an employee that gets time off from other duties, and is provided work space and IT resources by the employer, can be commissioning a work-for-hire, whether a formal agreement exists or not.
If this works, I hope you did not get your knowledge and education on a public school. Everything you create would automatically belong to the state.
It looks like the base program comes from Iowa, which gave the program to Wisconsin under the condition that it not be sold commercially. Thus, the trooper cannot sell this program anymore than Microsoft could sell Red Hat Linux without releasing the source code for free. The trooper quite possibly has copyrights to the changes he made, but if so he can only sell the changes he made to someone who already has Iowa's program.
A fair solution would be the officer gives the rights to his employer, and his employer gives him a nice bonus for overtime work ($10,000-$20,000, depending on the amount of time he spent and the quality of the changes he made). If I were him I'd try to settle out of court.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Paraphrasing the FSF's recommendations:
* Write a little bit
* Go to your boss and say "I'll write the rest if you allow it to be Free Software"
* Get that in writing
* Be prepared to say "good luck getting someone else to finish the project" as you walk away
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I see/hear a lot of that here in the UK. People are always complaining that the government make too much money from speeding fines and want them to cut the number of speeding cameras on the UK's roads. However, these people never seem to accept that if they just didn't break the law they'd have no fines to worry about. It's pathetic - not only do they feel no shame in breaking a law that is there for the public safety, they feel it is their unwritten right to break it and not be punished.
You never hear any of them suggesting the government do a study or a trial to see if our speed limits could safely be higher.
Oh man, this is *yet another* example of why you should keep your "hobbies" distinct from your job. If he had turned around and sold copies of it to other stations, not a problem, but once he deployed a single version at work, he opened up a world of pain for himself.
In addition, even if he got permission from his supervisors to develop whatever, whenever and he would have right to it, doesn't mean this is the case. It is unlikely that his supervisors have authorization to give this permission and/or to make capital purchases. Those decisions would have been made at a higher level.