You can do whatever you do with code you write you want. But Kevin Partner has that right as well. If he writes code for a contract, he has the right to state in that contract what the rights of the customer are.
In principle, I agree completely. In practice, however...
You might ask why I didn’t make a contract with this client in the first place. It’s because I’ve found, over the years, that insisting on a contract before development starts will result either in a delayed start or even a project being shelved.
...
Where such topics are brought up by a client in advance, we come to an agreement and encapsulate it in a “letter of understanding” written in plain English, which may not be legally watertight, but will offer protection so long as you cover all the main issues.
Shame on Kevin Partner for not clearly establishing up front what the customer's rights would be and allowing his clients to assume that they would have greater rights to the project deliverables than he intended to give them. As a professional who knows that issues sometimes arise over the disposition of rights to his work, he should have brought it up in advance if the client didn't so that an agreement could be reached, even if only in the form of a “letter of understanding” written in plain English and not as a formal contract.

And scorn upon him for his penultimate paragraph suggesting that the way to deal with this is to take your clients' money and then hold their code hostage until they give in to the terms that you demand rather than properly negotiating the terms of the project up front. While those methods may work in the short run, they destroy his reputation in the long run and, by association, may also harm my reputation and the reputations of other freelance and contract developers if clients assume that his "this isn't about blackmail" blackmail is a standard practice.

In reply to Re^2: What I am paid for by dsheroh
in thread What I am paid for by Svante

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