Ownership Discussion

fredriko

Active member
Joined
Jun 3, 2004
Messages
35
Programming Experience
10+
I work for a company as a software developer. During the last couple of months I have noticed a demand among our customers for a niche piece of software.
Unfortunately as I am fully loaded working on paid projects my boss cannot afford to take me off paid work to spend time working on a piece of software that might/might not sell.
Herein is my dilema. Personally, I would love to write this software as it will give me the opportunity to learn some new .net skills I've been avoiding for some time. It will also challenge me (creatively) which is the main reason I'm a developer. All good things.
I am considering offering the boss a deal. I will design and develop the software at my own cost and in my own time and allow my boss to sell it. I will take X% of each sale as payment for my up front effort. My problem is this. If the software proves to be a good seller I will want to be able to sell it myself away from my current company (via an internet portal of sorts).
My question is this. How do I protect myself? If this is software that my company would normally develop and i've come up with the idea as a result of working for this company how does this intellectual rights issue come into play? As remote as the possibility is, how do I protect myself from my current company claiming the software as their own IF it becomes popular???
 
My suggestion to you, would prefer to pattern or make your software copyrighted of yours but you should take the risk and absorb the cost of patterning or copyrighting.

Suggestion II : Instead of letting your boss sell it and you take X% from the sales. You might thinking of giving your boss your price per copy and at the same time fix a market price to let your boss to sell it..(of course must have a reasonable and good margin for them). And at the software part, you might thinking a way to control the genuine copy (like microsoft did, genuine copy able to activate while pirate copy will expired after some uses)

This is all only my suggestion, please get more idea from others..cheers..:)
 
Thanks for that Jacky.Goy.
The problem I have is that this software is not unique. It is like a new version of wordprocessor. There are plenty of other offerings that do something similar but not many people know about them. I feel copyrighting the software may therefore be difficult.
My biggest issue is ensuring that should I decide to leave the company at a later stage, they cannot prevent me from selling software I have created in my own time at my own expense by saying it was a company project?
 
You may try to develop a code which need to activate in order to continue using the software and make sure you are the only one able to generate the activation key.

After all customer or seller including your boss need you to provide the activation key in order to use that software and also supposingly the source code will only kept by you so very obvious your boss are not able to claim that this software belong to them due to they are not able to provide activation keys to customer.

And lastly the very ancient way is to propose to them with legal way up front. That means signing any agreement with them before allowing them to start selling your software.
 
I think I'd prefer to get them to sign an agreement. Any ideas where I can get one?
Am I going to have to pay lawyers to sort this out?
 
Sorry...about legal matter...it's not my expertise so I can't give any comment. :(
 
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