I read the blurb on the main page and couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what the hell the topic was. Why would searching for dates be an ethical problem? I try to find things in past on Google all the time....
Oh. Dates. As in girls. Not Julian calendar dates.
My company recently went through a sales tax audit here in Texas. While that may not seem relevant to the original question, the problem of code ownership arose in regards to charging sales tax.
Bottom line, "ownership" in something you create remains with you unless you explicitly sign it over to another party. To retain no ownership you have to explicitly note that fact in a contract.
Conversely, you retain whatever ownership rights not mentioned in a contract. So: Write a contract that only grants certain rights to your customer and omit everything else.
My company operates on a different approach: Work For Hire, basically. We had the fun of proving to the auditors that we didn't own the code we wrote (and therefore didn't charge any sales tax).
Slashdot Mirror
I read the blurb on the main page and couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what the hell the topic was. Why would searching for dates be an ethical problem? I try to find things in past on Google all the time....
Oh. Dates. As in girls. Not Julian calendar dates.
Slap forehead.
Bottom line, "ownership" in something you create remains with you unless you explicitly sign it over to another party. To retain no ownership you have to explicitly note that fact in a contract.
Conversely, you retain whatever ownership rights not mentioned in a contract. So: Write a contract that only grants certain rights to your customer and omit everything else.
My company operates on a different approach: Work For Hire, basically. We had the fun of proving to the auditors that we didn't own the code we wrote (and therefore didn't charge any sales tax).
Hope this info helps.