You are right, Catzwolf. If you have not been hired to do this work and has not been asked to do it (which I misread it to) you do not (as I read it - but I am no legal expert in these areas) have an obligation to turn the code over to the company.

If you had indeed been asked by your supervisor to develop this, I would stand by my previous statement

lol, got a nice discussion running

it was voluntary on my part, no supervisor approached me about it. i said i could get it done, supervisor gave the go ahead, and of course nothing was signed or formalized

also, my 'temp' purpose at the company has nothing to do with creating code, so my guess is that according to what you guys have told me (and assuming the temp agency didn't have a clause to cover exactly this issue), the code is mine


btw, is a module explicitly GNU/GPL since it is created for the xoops2 gnu/gpl system? or is there some other reason?

A module is GNU/GPL licensed because it is a part of a GNU/GPL system - without which it cannot work.

A problem with your statement, however, is that you approached the supervisor and he accepted that you did it in your working time.

If you were my employee (temp or not) I would not like that when you approach me with a desire to do some work (for which I pay you the hourly wage) you afterwards tell me that I can buy your work.

If you had done it besides your full-time work (or part-time, I don't know) because you had heard of or experienced the problem and without explicit accept by the company, I would agree with the general consent here that it is your code.

I think you would need a more law-proficient person to answer this, it goes over the head of most of us, I think.

the reason why i'm now considering who 'owns' the code, is because the dept is uncertain whether or not they'll be able to use it, so they asked me to no longer work on it in work time (whether i work on it in my own time or stop completely, was not discussed)

which means if i continued to work on it on my own time, and considering the code is housed on my server, that gives me more ability to claim it

but yeah, i need to find a lawyer, lol

catzwolf, i attempted to join the dev site, have heard no response whatsoever (tried to join same day that you recommended it)

anyways, the company will not be using the module, their internal dev team finally got on the ball and developed it in-house, so i'm looking to apply the code elsewhere

due to a misconfig, all applications were sent to catzwolf@xoops.org, so catz might want to check that mailbox and forward the applications to Predator (who handles them all). I would like to point out that we only approve properly motivated applications (we also get a lot of applications wher there is 0-6 months experience, and no motivation, so it's hard to see if the applicant has something to add, or is just there for the ride).

About the ownership of the code: you wrote it, so you own the intellectual rights. This means they have to say you wrote it. But if they paid for the code, then they own the use rights (and they did pay for it, whether explicitly or not). Since the code is wriiten to work on the XOOPS core system, and interacts with that, the code is automagically GPL licenced. This means that they can only use it under the conditions set by the GPL, making the code freely available for anyone when and if they want to distribute it. They cannot sell the code with restrictions on distribution etc.

Practically, they can take the code and continue development, and so can you. They cannot claim they wrote it, that would violate your patent inherent to the GPL. They can use it, as the GPL says they're free to do so. They can use it in propietary systems and make it part of that, but what the consequences and steps are there, is best found in the GPL FaQ on gnu.org.

Herko

nobody but myself has ever reviewed the code, it has never been in their possession (on their servers, etc), and they scrapped the project to use the fully in-house replacement (built from scratch by their official programmers)

would that change anything, in your opinion?

also, they show no further interest in it


btw, you said i can continue development, would that mean i can continue development and release publicly?

Quote:
This is a common misconception. Not all projects built under php or MySQL is GNU/GPL, without witch it cannot work. If the module was developed from scratch and contains no code or code snippets of modules or components that is GPL licenced you may change from GPL to other type of licence, but if you ship it with the GPL project it must be GPL licenced.

The long and short: Your module must be able to exist without relying on a supporting GPL licenced product, if you do not want to ship it as GPL.

According to my knowledge, no opensource licence has been tested in an international court of law.

Grotmis
Riaan

Quote:Agreed. Very few modules can work without XOOPS, since it relies on XOOPS user authentication or $xoopsDB. However, I may have been too general in my statement, although I don't personally perceive XOOPS as a part of the PHP system, but we are getting into technicalities here.

i don't mind the module being gnu/gpl, cus i intend to release publicly anyways, and yes, it does depend on xoops, i built it specifically to run in xoops, otherwise i would have just gone standalone if i wanted it to stand on it's own, lol