[Info-vax] [Attn: HP Employees] PDP-11 OS hobbyist licensing

[Paul Sture]

In article <l2k29l$iul$1 at dont-email.me>,
 David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:

> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> > In article <l2ifi2$tcq$1 at dont-email.me>,
> > 	David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
> >> Johnny Billquist wrote:
> >>
> >>> That is what one part of the problem here is about. The license in 
> >>> question mentions "emulator owned by DEC". This was simh, back when simh 
> >>> was a DEC "product". Bob later quit DEC, and continued working on simh 
> >>> on his own. Is this later, improved version, owned by Bob still covered 
> >>> by a license for software on a simulator owned by DEC?
> >>> Sounds doubtful, if you ask me.
> >> It was my impression, and I could be all wet, that SimH was never a DEC 
> >> product, but a hobby of Bob's.
> > 
> > There is always the legal question that because of its relationship to
> > Bob's job it would be consider DEC IP.  In any event we do know that in
> > the end DEC disavowed any ownership and it left with Bob.  The rest, as
> > they say, is history.
> > 
> > bill
> > 
> 
> The whole issue of "work for hire" can be nebulous.  If the employer 
> states that any software produced is theirs, and the person in question 
> agrees, that's one thing.  A person can tell the employer that he's 
> working on something private, and the employer can agree, or not.
> 
> Part of the issue is relavence to the work being done for the employer.

I recall a very bright colleague whose work wasn't really stretching him 
enough.  His manager thought he might start looking elsewhere for work 
due to boredom or frustration.  The manager was in the early stages of 
planning a management buyout of the team and products and wanted to keep 
this guy around, so encouraged him to do his own projects on the side.  
This was in the mid-1980s when having your own VMS development resources 
at home was prohibitively expensive.

In the case of the project I knew about, it was offered commercially and 
the agreement between the manager and developer was that the company 
would market the product, do the admin etc., and the developer would get 
£x per licence sold.

The developer did stay around for the MBO, but had the MBO fallen apart 
it is not too hard to see him walking away with full ownership of 
whatever private project came next but hadn't been published, and maybe 
even that first one.

-- 
Paul Sture

IBM's Thomas J. Watson predicted a "world market for maybe five computers".
Given the way this whole Cloud thing is going, he might have been extremely
prescient.