Submission + - getting paid to abandon an open source project? 2
darkeye writes: "I'm facing a difficult dilemma, in which the Slashdot community might have an opinion that could help me. I've been contributing to an open source project heavily, making considerable changes to code organization and quality, but which are unfinished at the moment. Now a company is approaching me to continue my changes. They want to keep the improvements to themselves, which can be done, as the project is published under the BSD license. While this is still fair, as they have all the rights to the work they pay for in full, but, they want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results on the original open source project itself, even if done separately in my free time.
Aside from ideological arguments (you should give back to the community you're taking from), how would you approach such a dilemma? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community, Moreover, they would take ownership of not just to what they'd pay for, but also of my changes leading up to this moment — as I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract."
Aside from ideological arguments (you should give back to the community you're taking from), how would you approach such a dilemma? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community, Moreover, they would take ownership of not just to what they'd pay for, but also of my changes leading up to this moment — as I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract."
