Re: Developing Open Source Software

On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 09:39 +0000, Tushar Joshi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I wish to know the general or mostly accepted practice of working with
> Open Source Development while you are working in a commercial project
> as your day job. Please share your thoughts about the following
> points:
> 
> * When you work on an Open Source project after your usual job hours
> is this approved by the employer?

I don't know there's a generally accepted practice. And it depends on
the open source project. Most companies have a non-compete clause in
their contracts. So, for example, if the company is a vehicle
manufacturer that has GPS equipment in its vehicles, you might be in
trouble if you worked on open source GPS software, while if you did
audio stuff or Ruby programming language hacking you'd be OK. And if the
company is Red Hat, I'd guess you wouldn't want to work on Debian,
openSuSE or Gentoo. ;)

> 
> * When you work on Open Source project in time other than the work
> hours can that be taken as and declared by Employer, that the Employer
> supports Open Source projects?

Only an employer can declare that they support open source projects --
you can't declare that for them.

> 
> * If you develop a open source project with license like LGPL is it
> allowed by the Employer to use that LGPL library in commercial project
> you are working?

Read the LGPL. And consult an attorney.

> 
> * What is the recommended practice followed by most software
> professionals who contribute to Open Source projects in terms of
> working hours?

I'm not sure what you mean by "working hours"? Do you mean hours a week
that you spend working on open source away from your day job? I don't
know how it is for "most software professionals", but a number of open
source professionals that I know are in small startup businesses where
the hours are long, and they're really in businesses related to the open
source project.

One other note: there are some people who actually get paid by "major"
corporations to contribute to open source. There's Red Hat/Fedora, of
course. But there are a number of other examples. 

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
ruby-perspectives.blogspot.com

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." --
Alfréd Rényi via Paul Erdős