[Mimedefang] Off Topic

[Kevin A. McGrail]

My very firm opinion is you are fighting a losing battle.  Assuming your job
was a programming job and assuming you are in the US and further assuming
that you were not EXTREMELY careful to never use any company resources on
the project, there claim is probably more than valid.

SpamAssassin is distributed under the Perl Artistic license, not the GPL I
believe.  However, I'm not addressing your GPL question which IMO is invalid
as well because A) I think Justin is pretty clear with SA that a web-based
front end is simply a alternate way to provide input to the program and
could therefore be proprietary.

Additionally, under GPL, I believe they can use the code internally forever
without actually releasing it.

Put simply, I believe that the company can more than claim they own the
product and you would put yourself in possibly hot water legally if you
publish 1 line of that code and the company actually cares about it.

However, assuming you don't have a non-compete, I will say that I've
developed a front-end for SpamAssassin based on some code from Justin Egland
and I've been extrapolating that code for serious enhancements for
MIMEDefang use.  I'd love to get it going more formally.  Any interest in
redirecting your anger into coding ;-)

KAM


> I wrote a web based front end to MIMEDefang and
> Spamassassin. I did most of the core development in
> my spare time after work. The remainder of my time
> was spent implementing it at a service for the company
> I worked for. Now I have left the company and they
> say they own the rights to that code.
>
> Doesn't the GPL from MIMEDefang and Spamassassin apply
> to the code I created, thus it would also be open
> source? Or does my employer own the code?
>
> If they do own the code, how can I rework the concept
> so I can release a new version of the code as open
> source?
>
> Any help or direction would be appreciated.