Firstly, I imagine that if you don't see the point, then it is highly likely that none of this applies to you or is even of interest to a person in your situation.
There are enough people who aren't in your situation though for this particular post to have been prompted by discussion on a mailing list enquiring about just such a thing.
Many people come to Catalyst who are actively involved in existing open-source projects in their spare time (or more) and they regularly want reassurance that any pre-existing work or ongoing work is not suddenly going to become awkwardly owned by ${COMPANY}.
Catalyst's business is not built around the ownership of intellectual property, and my own experience with previous businesses is that the care and feeding of the intellectual property beast is a significant and frequently valueless distraction. This also means that we don't have a "current field of effort" as such.
In the (many) cases where Catalyst staff are working on software owned by someone else then the case is pretty straightforward too, and much more like the case for contractors such as yourself. In that situation neither Catalyst nor the employee have copyright over the work.
We do thoroughly encourage plagiarism however, or "code reuse" as it is sometimes more jingoistically called, so long as acknowledgement happens and the source is known, primarily so that the effects of licensing are understood. A peculiarity of our client base perhaps, but it has so far been rare for open-source licensing terms to conflict with the desires of our clients.
What's the point?
Firstly, I imagine that if you don't see the point, then it is highly likely that none of this applies to you or is even of interest to a person in your situation.
There are enough people who aren't in your situation though for this particular post to have been prompted by discussion on a mailing list enquiring about just such a thing.
Many people come to Catalyst who are actively involved in existing open-source projects in their spare time (or more) and they regularly want reassurance that any pre-existing work or ongoing work is not suddenly going to become awkwardly owned by ${COMPANY}.
Catalyst's business is not built around the ownership of intellectual property, and my own experience with previous businesses is that the care and feeding of the intellectual property beast is a significant and frequently valueless distraction. This also means that we don't have a "current field of effort" as such.
In the (many) cases where Catalyst staff are working on software owned by someone else then the case is pretty straightforward too, and much more like the case for contractors such as yourself. In that situation neither Catalyst nor the employee have copyright over the work.
We do thoroughly encourage plagiarism however, or "code reuse" as it is sometimes more jingoistically called, so long as acknowledgement happens and the source is known, primarily so that the effects of licensing are understood. A peculiarity of our client base perhaps, but it has so far been rare for open-source licensing terms to conflict with the desires of our clients.