Business Models and Best Practices Best Practices II) Software and License Management Managing the Intellectual Property ri...Managing the Intellectual Property rights and other exploitation rights
In opposite to proprietary software, you will not develop on your own all the future code enhancements. You will then have to take care from the beginning to centralise all the exploitation rights inside one centralised software company to avoid having to take the risk to have to pay one day royalties to certain contributors or to suddenly have to suppress certain lines of code because the original author does not want you to use them anymore.
The same issue may occur if you want to keep your ability to modify or adjust your license terms and conditions afterwards. If you do not have sufficient exploitation rights, you will have to contact all the contributors individually in order to get their approval on your licensing modifications. The same already happened for other open source projects (e.g. Netscape/Mozilla) and this problem is not specific to releasing a software under a sustainable license.
Best Practice:
Be sure to have all the intellectual and exploitation rights of your software centralised in one single organisation.
Comments:
In several countries, you can not transfer intellectual property rights on the source code as it is legally managed by the "author's rights" (similar to a book or a painting). However you can require some "unlimited" exploitation rights on the code provided.
Practically, you will often found similar sentences in open or sustainable based licenses:
"You hereby grant to Original Contributor a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual and irrevocable license, to the extent of Your Intellectual Property Rights covering Your Error Corrections, Shared Modifications and Reformatted Specifications, to use, reproduce, modify, display and distribute Your Error Corrections, Shared Modifications and Reformatted Specifications, in any form, including the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of distribution."
Be sure to always have something similar valid for all the contributions you will receive EVEN if they are a free donation (check with your lawyer to have more details regarding your local legal practices).
The same issue may occur if you want to keep your ability to modify or adjust your license terms and conditions afterwards. If you do not have sufficient exploitation rights, you will have to contact all the contributors individually in order to get their approval on your licensing modifications. The same already happened for other open source projects (e.g. Netscape/Mozilla) and this problem is not specific to releasing a software under a sustainable license.
Best Practice:
Be sure to have all the intellectual and exploitation rights of your software centralised in one single organisation.
Comments:
In several countries, you can not transfer intellectual property rights on the source code as it is legally managed by the "author's rights" (similar to a book or a painting). However you can require some "unlimited" exploitation rights on the code provided.
Practically, you will often found similar sentences in open or sustainable based licenses:
"You hereby grant to Original Contributor a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual and irrevocable license, to the extent of Your Intellectual Property Rights covering Your Error Corrections, Shared Modifications and Reformatted Specifications, to use, reproduce, modify, display and distribute Your Error Corrections, Shared Modifications and Reformatted Specifications, in any form, including the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of distribution."
Be sure to always have something similar valid for all the contributions you will receive EVEN if they are a free donation (check with your lawyer to have more details regarding your local legal practices).
The contents of this website are licensed under the Open Software License 2.0 or Academic Free License 2.0
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