Can > 2 people collaborate on a piece of software, and then jointly own the rights to the source code? Any alternatives?

This should be a common scenario: you have 2 or more people working on a software project. The partners don't want to lose the rights to code they've written. How do they usually solve this problem?

What's the best practice? What about possible legal disputes later on? I'm attempting a very ambitious project and trying to bring several very egotistic people to work together!

Asked by CyberneticOrganism01 37 months ago Similar questions: people collaborate piece software jointly rights source code alternatives Computers > Software Development.

Similar questions: people collaborate piece software jointly rights source code alternatives.

All authors are joint owners You did not say what country you are in. I will presume for the sake of argument that you are in a country which is a signatory to the Berne Convention, which includes the U.S. , Canada and the U.K.Under the terms of the Berne Convention and most local laws, all persons who write code for a program would, unless they were doing this "for hire" would be joint owners of the copyright on the work. If there is no employee relationship they are effectively partners and every person who is an author of any part of the program is a joint owner with equal rights to license the entire program.

The alternative would be to set up a corporation or an LLC that would be the assignee of the copyright and would be the named owner of the program. There’s a minor fee that has to be paid to the state (or Canadian Province) you live in to create the entity (ranges from $50 to $300) and a yearly renewal fee (anything from $10 to $1000 or more) but the advantage would be you’d have a written document (because you’d have to create one to set the terms) that describes who gets what. There’s also some paperwork you’d have to either write out or pay a lawyer to do so but it’s not that hard; I've done the forms myself and I currently own two corporations (one is authorized to do business in more than one state) and an LLC.

But if you simply want a shared joint ownership, you can just simply claim both programmers as authors. This is a reason why you probably want to use a copyright notice even though they are no longer required because the copyright notice would provide an explicit declaration of who is claimed to be a copyright owner of the program.

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Please explain to me what Agile Development is in the software world.

Make a list of a least three useful open source software the are used in software development.

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