Potentially important real-time on-line discussion

[Wojciech Kocjan]

Kyler Laird wrote:
> People pay (what I consider to be) lots of money for me to write software
> for them.  I insist that it be open source (which makes for interesting
> contract negotiations sometimes).  I would be *thrilled* if someone took
> my code and used it.  My value is in providing solutions - not shielding
> intellectual property from use.

While I do agree with you, another problem is that you spent your time 
and your customer paid you to do the software.

Would it be fair if at this time, some other programmer took your code, 
added (not replaced) him to the copyright notice, changed about 5 things 
and charged the same for that?

I do not know the "right" answer to that. My previous software is 
closed-source, mainly because it is too tightly bound. That is why I try 
to split my new programs into reusable components and components related 
with the customer or with a specific problem. Then I can release the 
reusable parts (for example a lot of code to handle DB, DB gui, richtext 
editing :-). The benefit is that if someone else will use the code, 
he/she will probably find some errors that I and my customers haven't 
found yet, and probably correct them and send me back a patch - then my 
development time on the code will get a bit shorter, and I'll use that 
to solve another customer's problems.

However, this is just theory for now, mostly based on experience with 
other opensource code I used.

Note that I do not plan to release customer's application as opensource, 
only parts of it. I think this is a bit better than releasing all of it, 
since my company and my customer spent a lot of time on developing and 
facing problems. If some other company wants to solve similar problems, 
they can always come to me either writing the software, or consulting them.

-- 
WK