sparkyinak
Member
This can be an interesting topic that I have wondered about. I do ask not to knock's on anyone's specific practices here. It's just general discussion.
Once a program is written for a controller, who is the legal owner of that program? I know all software comes with pages up on pages of legal jargon in the end user agreement but what about the program itself?
For example, my widget maker has an extensive program that was written by company A. Later on down the road, we want to amend the program to add of modify the process however we want to go through company B, our local company we typically use versus the original company since they are several states over. It turns out the program is password protected or encrypted, blocked, locked, what ever so we contact the original programmer and they deny you access because they claim the program is their property, not ours.
I have actually ran into this once a couple years ago however, the situation worked itself out. It came up recently in water cooler jabber and wondered, what would happened if the original programmer for what ever reason felt like he was in the right and played hardball. I certainly understanding proprietary rights with software but what I am talking about is like Microsoft claiming legal rights for every Word or Excel document one generates.
Take away the end user agreements and the hard sale of programming entity. Can a programming entity lay legal claim to a controller's programming? What if its a standard program for the widget machine maker for their machines they churn out on a regular basis? What was your experience, how was it dealt with and what was the end result?
Once a program is written for a controller, who is the legal owner of that program? I know all software comes with pages up on pages of legal jargon in the end user agreement but what about the program itself?
For example, my widget maker has an extensive program that was written by company A. Later on down the road, we want to amend the program to add of modify the process however we want to go through company B, our local company we typically use versus the original company since they are several states over. It turns out the program is password protected or encrypted, blocked, locked, what ever so we contact the original programmer and they deny you access because they claim the program is their property, not ours.
I have actually ran into this once a couple years ago however, the situation worked itself out. It came up recently in water cooler jabber and wondered, what would happened if the original programmer for what ever reason felt like he was in the right and played hardball. I certainly understanding proprietary rights with software but what I am talking about is like Microsoft claiming legal rights for every Word or Excel document one generates.
Take away the end user agreements and the hard sale of programming entity. Can a programming entity lay legal claim to a controller's programming? What if its a standard program for the widget machine maker for their machines they churn out on a regular basis? What was your experience, how was it dealt with and what was the end result?