I do software consulting sleeved through various contracting or consulting companies. All of the paperwork I have to sign tries to have a claim to any IP created at the job. I immediately red line this unless there is some sort of reasonableness to it. I don’t mind giving some percentage of IP to a company that kept me busy somewhere for a year and the Resultant IP isn’t the main focus of the engagement. They are right that it probably wouldn’t have happened if they had not given me the opportunity. Otherwise I am not going to relinquish the right rights to code written to solve a problem. Most clauses I’ve seen are in this vein. Nope. DRY.
i follow a similar approach. i don't generally mind employers owning copyright for work they pay me for, but i am concerned that i might need to solve a problem that i already solved at a previous job and unintentionally recreate it in a way that it looks like a copy of the old solution.
to avoid this, where possible i ask that all code i write is released under a FOSS license giving me explicit permission to reuse it.
Now thats a philosophy I both agree and disagree with.
Agree: omg do i need to write this form again? Seriously just write a library already!
Disagree: this problem is subtly yet incompatibly different to what I've seen and dealt with before. The library would need x,y,z but their IP demands mean I'd lose rights to my closed-source library or be forced to open source it to keep using it elsewhere.
I agree with you. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. However what the practical application of DRY ends up being for me is that I have a "bag of tricks" I carry with me as well as my own "library o' repetitious programming tasks" that I look into first. Much of the time I can save a lot of time by reusing old code. I may have a bit of code that is too specific for the original purpose and get tired of the technical debt it causes, and re-write it. So in that case I am repeating myself, but its with the benefit of experience. More of a refactor than repeat.
but that's exactly the case where things become an issue. if you were able to write a library, it would be worth the effort to write it once more from scratch and make sure that the copyright of the previous code is not infringed.
instead however, what happens is that you have a problem that looks similar to a previous problem, so you take the old code and modify it to fit the new problem.
NOW you have the additional problem of having reused code that's owned by employer A, for a project at employer B.
