hard off wrote:
as far as i know...and from what i heard from miller's talk which was recorded at the icmc recently....the pd licence is really very open...and you can do whatever you want with it nearly.
true, but unfortunately i (not being a lawyer) doesn't help you much here.
so what i'm guessing is that it would be up to you to take any steps towards 'owning' or copyrighting your own work.
not really. software developped for an employer might well belong to the employer (normally a "private" employer, but it might be true for university too
- depending on the law wherever you are) and not to the developer who
did all the work (i too have to point you towards the millermax/ircam thing) this might well be defined in the fine-print.
as with our institute we are developping a _lot_ with pd, some things are open sourced (GPL, after some discussion) and others are totally proprietary (industry corporation: you often find you cannot do much if you do such things)
the point is, that your employer could allow you to publish several things under a GPL-license (you have to check with them)
pd's license is very free, allowing you to nicely use it for totally commercial/proprietary projects. the thing is different with external libraries: a lot of them are licensed under GPL. while i am not entirely sure, whether using a GPL-external can be considered as "linking against a library" (but i am rather positive about it), this would mean, that such patch would need to be GPLed too. again you should talk with your employer, whether it is ok for them if you use such libraries. i don't think it is a very good idea if they have very clear ideas about IP, and you just use GPL-libraries and therefore claim that everything you do is GPLed too. i guess they might just decide to not distribute the software (that belongs to them) at all, so the license (which only comes to action when it comes to distributing) has no impact at all.
on the other side, you might well try to release as much software as possible with a free license right now before you talk to them, in order to get a foot in the door.
however, everything you write in your spare time (when nobody is paying for it) is your own property and you do with it whatever you like (like licensing it in terms of freedom). i have written GPL'ed software while being at our institute when there hasn't been a discussion about that yet.
but really...i find it very hard to believe that anyone would ever try to steal your patches. what would they have to gain? who's going to pay money for patches that run in a system that is otherwise completely open source?
people that do not have the knowledge to write the patches themselves ? who is going to pay for proprietary software on linux at all ? people do!
university students....some of them are so full of conspiracy theories....take what they say with a grain of salt i reckon.
unfortunately i am no student any longer. and of course it is highly unlikely that anybody will sue you, just because you have written and freed a nice sequencer.
mfg.ad.r IOhannes