My ContractPatch to solely work on free software

I am a strong believer the free software and free culture movements and have basically dedicated my life to them. A significant part of that has been getting the opportunity to create free content as part of my job, first at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and now at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF).

When I started at the WMF in 2013, the first contract I signed with them contained two key provisions (the rest of the contract was pretty important too, just irrelevant to this blog post). First, all content I created would be released under an OSI-approved license (for software) or a Creative Commons ShareAlike license (for everything else). The copyrights would be jointly owned by myself and the WMF. And second, I would own any patents, and the WMF would need my permission to use them in an offensive manner.

To be clear, these were terms that were in the "standard" WMF contract at the time, I didn't come up with them (it's unclear how standard they actually were, I've spoken to people who joined the WMF before me and never had them). When I rejoined the WMF in late 2020, they were no longer present and I negotiated them back in. And then a year later, in late 2021, I successfully negotiated similar terms into my contract with FPF.

I've posted the exact terms that are in my FPF contract on my website and will aim to keep that up to date if things change. As I've stated there, I am not a lawyer so please don't treat this as legal advice. While this has been reviewed by lawyers, they all worked at the organizations I was negotiating with, so they weren't my lawyer.

Software Freedom Conservancy started an intiative called "ContractPatch" to help fellow developers negotiate with employers for terms that benefit free software. It hasn't really materialized in the way that it was advertised, but I'm happy to contribute (it's a bit overdue really).

I'm not sure how useful my experience is for others; both of the non-profit foundations in question basically develop only free software, so the negotating wasn't really a struggle. Conservancy wrote a nice blog post explaining the difference of having copyrights be owned by your (for-profit) employer versus a charity. Unsurprisingly, they didn't really go into the scenario of having a charity as your employer :)

Practically speaking, this doesn't really get me that much code wise. I work on established free software projects that cannot be unilaterally relicensed and yes, in the long-term, keeping copyrights with charitable foundations is a good thing. So it's mostly a feel good thing that I jointly own my copyrights. The biggest thing is that all the non-code projects I work on are freely licensed too, like conference presentations, articles, etc.

And none of them were ever going to bother filing patents on my work, so that's a freebie. But I can still feel good about doing my part to disarm software patents.