From: Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy (grisha_at_ispol.com)
Date: Mon 21 Feb 2005 - 00:17:25 GMT
On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Nicolas Costes wrote:
> You need to deeply discuss those facts with the company, and why not try to
> secure the vservers' future in the job contract... My english is too bad when
> it comes to that domain, but I can try to say it like this: "I agree to work
> for you if you agree to support vservers developpement, instead of trying to
> make them disappear, ie. use and promote the vservers technology in your
> products, and respect the GPL".
That'd be all water under the bridge, since ultimately a corporation is to
serve its stockholders regardless of what any officer of the corporation
may say, even if it is truly spoken from the heart.
The key thing is the holder of the copyright. And a typical employment
agreement usually states that whatever work you do is actually owned by
the company (regardless whether you do it in your spare time). And whoever
owns the copyright can govern the project in whichever direction possible,
even make part or all of it closed-source. I do not mean to say that this
is what's going to happen, but it's a possibility nonetheless.
Therefore the ideal situation is when the copyright is owned by a separate
corporate entity, usually a not-for-profit, formed with a charter to
specifically to support the project. Some good examples are the ASF
(apache), Mozilla Foundation, OSDL, PSF, etc, etc. These organizations
have no other interests, are not there to make money and cannot be easily
intimidated legally or otherwise. There is a good reason why all these
foundations exist in today's world of SCO and the like.
Grisha
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