intellectual property agreements and open source . was - Re: Why does this fail? [2]

[Skip Montanaro]

    Dave> How does participating in open source work for someone (me) who
    Dave> has signed the customary intellectual property agreement with the
    Dave> corporation that they work for? Since programming is part of my
    Dave> job, developing test solutions implemented on automatic test
    Dave> equipment (the hardware too) I don't know if I would/could be
    Dave> poison to an open source project. How does that work? 

Only your corporate counsel knows for sure. <wink>  Seriously, the degree to
which you are allowed to release code to an open source project and the
manner in which is released is probably a matter best taken up with your
company's legal department.  Some companies are fairly enlightened.  Some
are not.  You may need very little review to release bug fixes or test cases
(my guess is you might be pretty good at writing test cases ;-), more review
to release a new module or package, and considerable participation by
management and the legal eagles if you want to release a sophisticated
application into the wild.

In any case, if you make large contributions to an open source project such
as Python, I'm pretty sure a release form for substantial amounts of code
will be required at the Python end of things.  See here

    http://www.python.org/psf/psf-contributor-agreement.html

for more details.  Note that it hasn't been updated in a couple years.  I
don't know if MAL has something which is more up-to-date.

Skip