OT: Employee Contracts/ NDAs and OSS contribution

[Tom L. <tl...@cp...>]

Hi-

first, sorry for an OT post in the middle of the 5.0RC phase, but…:

My company is about to impose a new Non-disclosure/ Non-compete/ Other Stuff… agreement. It’s the usual draconian nonsense, but the bit that really concerns me is the absence of explicit permission to contribute to, or found, Open Source projects. (This can of course lead to contamination of OSS projects with code which the author did not have the right to contribute…  q.v. SCO/IBM/Linux )

Happily, my company is prepared to add a clause to cover OSS development, but, much googling later, I’ve failed to turn up good legalese boilerplate to work with…

I wonder if any gnuplot devs on this list are employed by commercial companies*, are contributing to gnuplot (or other OSS) on company time (which, under some contracts, is 24/7…), and have wording in their contracts to make this OK, that we might be able to borrow…?

We’re located in Colorado, USA, but I’d be interested in wording from anywhere in the world where this might be an issue.

TIA if anyone can help, and apologies for the bandwidth…

Tom Lawton

(*US Government agencies are rather different, since they cannot copyright, and their code- unless security forbids- has to be available to the public domain; Academia may or may not fall into a similar position…)