Re: Company Invention Disclaimers

On Wednesday 10 March 2004, doc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave O Connor) wrote:

>I've got some software I wrote that I'm trying to get my company to disclaim
>the copyright on, so that I can release it under some open-source license.

Unless you specifically WANT your company to abandon its copyright on the
software, there's no reason to try to do this. Copyright and license are two
separate things, but without somebody asserting a copyright on the software,
there is in fact no need for any license (because a software license is
essentially a grant of rights to use somebody else's copyrighted software
under particular terms)

>certain I've seen templates for disclaimer forms before (I know I've seen
ones
>drafted by other, larger comapnies I've worked for, but sadly, they probably
>belong to them). Does anyone know of anything more verbose then a two-line
"me
>won, you go byebye now." that it's recommended to use?
>
>This sounds like something gnu.org/FSF should have covered, but I'm not
>seeing it anywhere obvious.


The GPL is the open source license (yes, I know - RMS is spinning right about
now) with which I'm most familiar and for which I have most respect, and if
you're interested in using that, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html
might be a good place to start.


Niall
--
Irish Linux Users' Group
http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/