NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Snyder]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Allen
Shaw<allen at twomiceandastrawberry.com> wrote:

> Anyway, I'm not fishing for a debate about licensing terms or contract law.
>  I'm just wondering if anyone here does or has done jobs like this, and how
> you a) explain it to your clients verbally, and b) phrase it contractually.
> Anybody?
>
> - A.

When I freelanced I was always very up front about my desire to work
with open source libraries and write open source code. Most clients
didn't care, a few thought it was a neat idea.

I once explained to someone that if they let me release the source
code, they would get a 25% discount on the project. I might have
padded my initial bid hoping this would happen. ;-) Later, I just made
it clear that open source was how I worked. Simple, easy, and every
project benefitted from the ones that came before.

As for contract, just pick a license (BSD seems to raise fewer hackles
than GPL, but again most non-programmers don't care) and say something
like: Client will retain the copyright to all work for hire, but
agrees to release the project source code under the <specific license
here> license.

I don't think you really want to be more specific than that in a
contract. What does it mean to release? Where is it posted? Leave it
alone so you can decide later.