Perhaps I didn't phrase my question well. From reading posts by others, this seemed to be an issue of great interest to most professional Perl programmers. From reading those same posts most monks are unable/unwilling to hire a lawyer for each project.

One thing has me curious. When many others, including merlyn, have posted many times about problems they had because they failed to obtain an adequate contract for a Perl programming (or Perl book writing) project, no one said anything about it not being Perl related, marked it "considered", or talked about it being deleted. Indeed there were a couple of different very active threads here when one of our most beloved members, who has contributed much to Perl Monks and CPAN over the years had to stop contributing modules or posting code because he signed a bad contract. I'm thinking also about merlyn's post where he lost many thousands of dollars because he failed to have an adequate contract, which appeared to be of much interest to many monks.

That just leaves me asking what exacly the criteria are. Would these previous posts be "Perl related" because they discussed a problem, rather than an attempt at a solution? Is reporting problems more valuable than seeking solutions? Or does the name of the person posting determine whether or not it's "Perl related", such that of two posts on the same topic one may be "Perl related" because it was posted by a recognizable nick, while if the same post was made by a less recognizable nick it's no longer "Perl related"?

Agreed, many of the same issues apply when programming in other languages. Some of the contract issues are unique to perl, such as the copyright clauses of a contract for a project that includes/makes use of modules or libraries under the Perl Artistic License. Similarly, any of the algorithms discussed on this site could also be coded in some other language, but here you'll find the best ways to implement them in Perl. Perhaps if this is not an appropriate place to discuss the business and legal considerations faced by every professional Perl programmer someone might be able to suggest what an appropriate forum WOULD be?

Lastly, I must ask those who feel that the legal and contractual issues that apply to every professional Perl project are not Perl related if I were to hire a IP lawyer to write an excellent Perl programming contract form that could be used by any monk who wished to use it, would that be Perl related?

Ray B. Morris
support@bettercgi.com

In reply to Re^2: Custom perl programming contract by raymor
in thread Custom perl programming contract by raymor

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.