4 ms·

Dual license your code. You can still supply it to your current employer, and any future employer under a proprietary license.

brazzledazzle 11y ago
Then you need a CLA if you accept contributions right?
- leohutson 11y ago
  I was more thinking of stuff that is entirely mine that I just want to dump a copy of onto the web. I don't think it's fair to make contributors assign copyright to me, especially if they are major. I'd probably just keep a private fork from before their contributions, and, if for whatever reason my employer is GPL averse, that's their problem, and they can pay to reimplement anything they need from after that point. Edit: Perhaps a fair way to do it would be to say that contributors who agree to the CLA are also assigned rights to the whole code base, with the restriction of only being able to redistribute it wholesale as GPL. Similar to the way commercial sound and video clip libraries are licensed, you are allowed to redistribute it as part of another work in whatever license you like, but wholesale redistribution is only allowed under the GPL. That would give the same advantages as a more permissive license, but reduce the freerider problem to some extent.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    Re: your edit–that's an interesting idea. It seems like in practice it could be abused but in terms of your goal it's probably better to favor practicality over edge cases and a minority of people that would abuse it.
asgard1024 11y ago
What you propose is a free market solution - make property out of it. (And I don't think free market is actually desirable for most people but that's for another debate.) From a practical point of view, it's complicated to dual license their code to the employer. If the employer refuses to license it, then the employee has to find the job which lets him license it (if he wishes to use it). That may be difficult. In other words, if you have software as property, the idea "I want to work on the same code base in the future for a living" may contradict with someone else's idea "I am paying for it therefore you do what I want". In theoretical free market this should work out, but in reality there is a lot of frictions.

brazzledazzle 11y ago

Then you need a CLA if you accept contributions right?

leohutson 11y ago
I was more thinking of stuff that is entirely mine that I just want to dump a copy of onto the web. I don't think it's fair to make contributors assign copyright to me, especially if they are major. I'd probably just keep a private fork from before their contributions, and, if for whatever reason my employer is GPL averse, that's their problem, and they can pay to reimplement anything they need from after that point. Edit: Perhaps a fair way to do it would be to say that contributors who agree to the CLA are also assigned rights to the whole code base, with the restriction of only being able to redistribute it wholesale as GPL. Similar to the way commercial sound and video clip libraries are licensed, you are allowed to redistribute it as part of another work in whatever license you like, but wholesale redistribution is only allowed under the GPL. That would give the same advantages as a more permissive license, but reduce the freerider problem to some extent.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  Re: your edit–that's an interesting idea. It seems like in practice it could be abused but in terms of your goal it's probably better to favor practicality over edge cases and a minority of people that would abuse it.

asgard1024 11y ago

What you propose is a free market solution - make property out of it. (And I don't think free market is actually desirable for most people but that's for another debate.) From a practical point of view, it's complicated to dual license their code to the employer. If the employer refuses to license it, then the employee has to find the job which lets him license it (if he wishes to use it). That may be difficult. In other words, if you have software as property, the idea "I want to work on the same code base in the future for a living" may contradict with someone else's idea "I am paying for it therefore you do what I want". In theoretical free market this should work out, but in reality there is a lot of frictions.