Writing a Contract for GPL'd Code?

An anonymous reader wonders: "I am working as an independent developer for a client I have a long relationship with, and of whom I used to be an employee. I've made informal contracts in the past for development work, but this job is much more significant. Also, the client has gone to court over software development in the past; he was in the right to do so, but I need to cover myself. The product will be released under the (L)GPL and copyrighted by me, and the client will also be agreeing to open the license and give me the copyright on some code I previously developed. I plan to consult a lawyer, but I just want a little more direction before I start investing hours. Are there any resources I should know about, beyond what the FSF has to offer?"

Comments

Process suggestions.

[kfogel]

Will you be engaging an external development community as part of this contract? Will you be writing new code from scratch, or integrating it into an existing codebase (and if so, is that existing codebase already open source or not)?

Retaining copyright for yourself is a good idea; you can just make sure the contract grants the other party "perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable rights to use, sublicense, and distribute the software" or something like that (I am not a lawyer, though -- and you might want to take out the 'sublicense', depending on your goals, consult a lawyer about that).

I wrote a little bit about this process in

      http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/contracting.htm l

by the way.

Good luck,
-Karl