Contractors fired for using GPL code 13331

First of all, moving ANY copyrighted code into proprietary code and selling it as original work - not subject to the terms of the license is a criminal act. It's the very purpose of copyright law. A contractor writes code that is supposed to be original work, typically the contractor's employer and the client will work out exactly who has what intellectual property rights to what code being developed.

In most cases, the contractor's employer will grant a nonexclusive unlimited use license to the code being created to the client, this will allow the contractor's employer to use tools and generalized solutions in future engagements. At the same time, the client doesn't have to pay royalties on a "per use" basis for code which they helped fund.

In special cases, where the client feels that the code or business logic is highly contriversial or proprietary (possibly even illegal), the client will insist that this carfully declared code be made their exclusive property.

In other situations, the client is simply paying for custimizations of the contractor's proprietary product. For example, if an Oracle consultant came in and wrote some custom queries for a client, the client would not automatically be enbreastled to unlimited use licenses to the code in question.

Most corporations also now require that employees sign agreements which gives the corporation all rights to any technology created by the employee that relates to his particular area of employment. This usually includes patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets.

Many companies DO have their developers take a "certification" to make sure that they understand the nature of each of the major license types.

Putting GPL software into the same library as Microsoft proprietary code and claiming that either or both are your own original work is not only unethical, it's illegal. You can declare that you are using GPL code, and work out how to isolate the GPL code from the Microsoft proprietary NDA code. You can determine whether it's possible to decouple the functionality in such a way that the proprietary code can call the GPL code using a service - such as CORBA or RPC, or you can possibly create LGPL libraries to isolate the GPL code from the LGPL code and isolate the LGPL libraries from the Proprietary code.

Even these isolation tactics may not be effective in some cases. For example, if you use a GPL-LGPL agent or broker to connect to Oracle, the Oracle license covers ANY FORM of multiplexing. Simply put, even if you use a Web Browser, Apache, and connect using PERL, you need to have the proper type of license for Oracle that covers each individual user accessing the system, regardless of how they are identified. Normally, customers who want to use Oracle as a Web server will license 9i or 10g which have a very large price tag which covers an unlimited number of users.

Many companies are now basing their pricing structures on the capacities of the machine, the number of MIPS and Megs used. IBM for example has licenses for "Capacity Units" and customers are encouraged to decouple as much of the service as possible using Open Source and other decoupling techniques. This allows a customer to create a "pure database engine" which can run 100% of the resources being allocated, and the capacity is charged accordingly. The Web Server, Application server, and middleware are placed on separate machines, which will do the formating and session state management.