Sample contracts for sponsored development?

Norbert Bollow <[email protected]> Wed, 28 Apr 2004 14:13:36 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.comp.misc.free-software-business
Message-ID <[email protected]>
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It looks like we have the first serious industry sponsor for
development on DotGNU Portable.NET ... does anyone have sample
contacts for the business relationship of such a sponsorship?

The project has a policy requiring copyright assignment, so
clearly our sponsor's contract needs to say that the sponsor will
not own the copyright on the sponsored code.  On the other hand, the
sponsor would like to give us source code for a widget lib that
implements the _corporate_identity_ aspects of their GUIs which
they need to have working on the DotGNU platform.  While there
apparantly aren't any real business secrets in this source code,
clearly they want to keep it proprietary.  In particular, this
source code should not be affected by the disclaimer of copyright
interest, and the contract should say something about this source
code being handled reasonably carefully to prevent it e.g. from
showing upon any publicly accessible ftp server or http server,
and to prevent any copy-and-paste from this proprietary code into
code which is supposed to be Free Software.

Greetings, Norbert.

- -- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of DotGNU, see http://dotgnu.org/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch
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