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Your employer is an entity (a person, an LLC, or a corporation), you work for that entity. The entity is allowed to distribute it among themselves but the entit
by o-__-o 7y ago
Your employer is an entity (a person, an LLC, or a corporation), you work for that entity. The entity is allowed to distribute it among themselves but the entity prevents itself from distributing to others (by following the license constraints). You, the employee, do not gain the right to the software because the employer did not give you, personally, any permission to the software.
Only once the software has been distributed by the employer to a third party do you, the employee, get rights to that GPL software. You can replace GPL with other licenses, the premise remains the same: an employee is part of the employer and not a separate entity.
- de_watcher 7y agoIf the employer distributes to the third party then the employee still doesn't have the rights. But the third party can distribute to anybody.
- o-__-o 7y agoHmm GPL states any distributed modifications must be shared. So the employee does not violate any licenses by snagging a copy of the code that was distributed. I’m sure there may be other violations that may cause an involuntary termination event, but per the license the world now has the right (and the company is violating the GPL by not offering the code) I will add if the company fixes their GPL violation then the employee is now violating the new license (since the GpL licensed code wasn’t valid in the first place). So it is best to not pirate any code even if you think it should be open (until the employer has confirmed in some way)
- de_watcher 7y agoLicense is between two parties, world doesn't have any rights. I can see how two companies can use GPL to share the code they both use internally, and nobody else has the right to use it unless one of the companies "conveys" it to them.