Forge Your Future with Open Source

Company Policies

As you learned in Chapter 1, ​The Foundations and Philosophies of Free and Open Source​, copyright is a complicated thing, but its concepts and those of intellectual property underlie every free and open source software project and contribution. You also learned that while sometimes you automatically have copyright over your creations, in some countries you must apply for it, and other times your employer retains copyright over anything you create while employed by them. This can be a big hurdle when you’re trying to contribute to a FOSS project, because depending on your employment agreement, the work you submit to the project may not be yours to give. Submitting a contribution over which you hold no copyright is a recipe for ...