3 ms·

Why wouldn't you control the IP with outsourced development? Obviously, any competent company would make the outsourced developers / development house hand over

• notahacker 12y ago
  Legal threats against ex-employees based in your home country carry an awful lot more weight than legal threats against a subcontractor based in India, Russia or China.
• eropple 12y ago
  YM, of course, MV, but I've worked with outsourced teams (plural) before and the decisions I've observed have suggested to me that, regardless of whatever IP agreements you've made, some will obviously be trying to build stuff they can reuse elsewhere. It's hard to enforce an IP agreement when you're in Boston and they're a couple continents away.
• logfromblammo 12y ago
  And, surely, they will honor their contracts to the letter. Your employees might take home your entire code base in the US, while working on-site on an air-gapped network. They can certainly do it when you're set up for remote work, almost by definition. In the US, the payoff for stealing your employer's code is low, and the risk of punishment high, but it still happens. I can't speak for non-US countries, but I would guess that most have a bit more relaxed attitude toward enforcement, especially when it would be on behalf of a US company. If you think your IP is secure from the software developers who wrote it, you do not understand how they work. If you do not hold the loyalty of your developers, you do not control the IP, regardless of what the contracts say.
  • joesmo 12y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I actually hadn't thought of them stealing the IP despite the contract, but it makes sense that it'd happen.