fnf@unisoft.UUCP (Fred Fish) (05/09/85)
From George Van Treeck @ AI Technology Group, Digital Equip Corp. > I work for Digital Equip. Corp. as a software engineer. I have been > told by my manager, who has consulted with the DEC's legal department, that > DEC owns all software that I develop at home on my MAC. ... Not being a lawyer take all the following with a huge grain of salt ... My understanding of the situation is that unless they can show that you used any of their hardware or software resouces, or that your product was something that you could reasonably be expected to produce as a part of your employment, you can tell them to go fly a kite. I.E. if you are an applications programming doing Fortran development at DEC and you write a game for your MAC from scratch, using none of their proprietary code or algorithms, then you are probably safe. But if you are a compiler developer doing development work on their VMS compiler and you decide to implement a MAC compiler on the side, you might have some problems. Naturally, talk to a lawyer if this is important enough to you. Here in California there are very explicit laws about what claims an employer has to an employee's intellectual property, regardless of any employment contracts you may have been required to sign. -Fred