Re: Developing Open Source Software

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 09:39 +0000, Tushar Joshi wrote:

>> * 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. ;)

You might also want to look at your company's policy with regard to 
ownership of code you write.  Some companies like to claim that any code 
you write while employed by them belongs to them.  Whether or not this 
is absurd depends on your relationship with your employer and possibly 
how much you or they are willing to spend on lawyers.