Re: Ethics question...

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001 20:59:41 -0600, "Scott Gerhardt" <scott@gerhardt-it.com> wrote: >If your client paid you to develop the E-Commerce system they would >typically own all rights to it unless otherwise agreed upon. I don't know what country you are speaking of, but in the U.S., that view is a commonly held misconception. Under U.S. copyright law, if the author is an independent contractor, in the absence of a written agreement covering the work, the author owns all copyrights to the work, with the exception that the client who paid for the work is automatically granted a license to their one copy (and only their one copy). The client does *not* have copy _rights_ which permit them to resell it, or even give it away, unless the author specifically gave them those rights in writing, such as a work for hire agreement. If the author was working as an employee, OTOH, then the situation is reversed, and the employer owns the copyrights by default. As for the license of PHP itself, vs. an author's license to any code he writes in the language known as PHP: Writing application code in the PHP language does not make the code you wrote automatically become open source, Yes, the PHP processor is open source, but its copyright is entirely separate and distinct from any application system which may be written in the PHP language. I if write a C program, it does not matter whether I compile it with GCC which is GPLed, or with some proprietary C compiler. Either one is irrelevant for determining ownership of the copyrights which apply to the code I wrote in the C language. You cannot copyright ideas, and the PHP language is only an idea. The PHP Apache module or other PHP processor is an *expression* of ideas embodied in the PHP language. And only its expression can be copyrighted, not the idea itself. Suppose RWS said you have to stop writing proprietary C programs, just because someone might compile it with GCC? I hope you would laugh. :-) Egan