Going Freelance & Ownership of Code

[Aaron]

Hi,

I'm hoping to gauge the opinions of some experts here. I have two specific questions. Firstly some background to the situation. I work for a reasonably large company and part of my job function has included the design, development and maintenance of a reasonably large Filemaker solution that comprises 60 client users connected to FM Server and another 30 external users connected via a FM Unlimited web interface (CDML). In addition, the solution uses a number of plugins to perform tasks including moving files, completing web forms, sending mail and parsing basic XML strings. There are about 40 related FM databases in the solution. At a guess, it took approximately 4 - 6 months to develop and has now been running about 18 months with ongoing improvments and maintenance.

The two questions I have are;

1) I am considering going freelance and hopefully maintaining a contract with my existing employer for further maintenance and development of the system. I know a lot of people stick to the hourly rate type model, however, it seems to me that annual contracts are becoming popular. This certainly seems to be the norm for the bigger guys. Has anyone done this and if so, how would you go about working out a fee? I know that within my organisation, we typically pay 10% of the purchase price of the software. I could go for something like that, but I have no idea how to work out how much it would have cost in the first place to develop the system I have developed. This will be my first freelance foray.

2) Does my employer own the complete code? (much of the work was actually done in my own time). The reason I ask is that I would like to re-use some of the work I have already done in other solutions should I go freelance. I don't want to re-use the entire system; just parts of it. Are there any hard and fast legal rules and does anyone else have experience of this?

Thank you in advance to anyone who can offer assistance. It is really appreciated.

Thanks

[Kurt Knippel]

To question #1, the answer really depends upon how much time you expect to spend working on the maintainence. The annual contract is kinda like insurance, you are betting that you'll spend less time than was paid for, while they are betting that they will pay less for the contract than the actual work that they get out of you.

In this situation you can probably judge pretty well the amount of work you do on an annual basis and can set the contract accordingly.

To question#2, the answer will really be determined by the laws in your area. However in general, unless another contract specifies otherwise, the EMPLOYER owns the results of an EMPLOYEE'S work. Start by asking your employer for permission.

[Kingsrealm]

Chances are you were hired under a standard work-for-hire employment agreement. You may have also signed a non-disclosure and a non-compete agreement. This would mean you could not take the same solution with the company's information and sell it on the open market.

That being said you should have no problem taking a template of the solution and repackaging it in another form such as modular add-ons with a host core solution.

The only concern for your company is if the solution enables a proprietary process or trade secret. This might lead to legal action if a competitor buys your solution.

Bottom line - be concerned for your company's interests - you should be able to "build a similar" solution that has multiple uses to other clients without crossing any legal boundaries.

Marc

www.kingsrealm.com