<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Ex. If Henry Ford came to me asked me to build a factory to build his
<br>cars quickly. Then I used my skill to build an assembly line. Then the<br>Wright Brothers came to be and asked for me to build a factory for<br>their planes. I would build an assembly line.<br><br>I don't see any issue here because the tool was created by me and the
<br>overall product is different. If someone hires me to build a new kind<br>of social networking site that has never been done before and I create<br>a super fast data access library while building that site, that tool<br>
is mine and is my creative work. I would not re-create the social<br>networking idea that was the final product but I would re-use my code<br>on the next pizza site I built.<br></blockquote><div><br>If you did this Henry Ford would sue you. The reason being he owns the patent on the assembly line, he owns all the machines and patents on all those machines. In fact this is exactly what gave Ford an advantage for so many years. When you were working for Ford in this scenario, everything you did, every idea you came up with belonged to him.
<br><br>This thread is amazing to me. I've been on both sides of the fence, and you have to come to the realization that if you're hired as a contractor to build something for someone else, then they own it, if you're a full time employee and you invent something cool while on the job for them, they own it!!! they own all of it. If they agree to license it under the GPL then it should be made publicly available, but any client willing license part of that back to the developer or the developer using any part of it for their own personal gain through reselling it and charging more money for more custom development of it is just crazy, and quite possibly illegal.
<br><br>I understand that many of you are competing with offshore companies, you will do yourselves a favor to keep this in mind, that for a US based company to drag an offshore company through litigation is quite expensive (so they just won't do it), its much less expensive for a US based company to drag a US based company through litigation.
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