Copyright Payment Guarantee

(draft)

Distributed Commercial Projects can be a risk for Developers.

In order to ensure the payments, an agreement (e.g. Joint Copyright Agreement?) should contain a clause which assigns copyright only when the client has payed all invoices related to the task.

This is especially important for the upcoming category of "Commercial Open Source Projects", which in essence pick parts of the Open Source processes, without providing an Liberal Open Source License.

Mechanism

All contributions (source code, object code, patches, specifications, documentations, comments, ...) remain under the exclusive copyright of the developer, until the issued invoices are payed.

If a commercial client does not pay an invoice, the consultant can claim copyright. This renders all affected project parts unusable (for further development and especially for licensing).

The mechanism is very simple and should be granted to any developer which contributes code, especially if this is done for reduced rates.

Verification

This mechanism was verified in context of the Assembla Team Rating

Conclusions

The mechanism is not applicable:

• for analytical/refactoring tasks, which result in low amounts of code
  • results can be easily recreated (the analysis is the difficult part and is not visible)
• for tasks which are discussed on resources controlled by the client
  • client can delete messages

The mechanism is applicable:

• Tasks which result in large amounts of code within a public project.
• Tasks which are negotiated publically
• Project discussion happens within publically archived resources.