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In countries like India, where IT laws are weak, how do you protect your code?
I have had a negative experience recently. So, I wanted to build a SaaS product and hired a small IT company for the development. We only had a mutual agreement and the work went on smoothly. We were building it on a open source license and my developer had all the codes in his online repository account. When the product was ready I started to market the product and got a few clients within a month. Seeing the success and potential of the software, my developer started to market the product on his own without informing me. He sold it to a French company and when I came to know about it he said he will give me a minimum percentage of the sales. But, he wants to sign a legal document with a lot of ifs and thens. He has all the code at his disposal. I had no choice but to back off from the project!
Now, I am building a different product and want to know how I can protect my code so as to protect my interest.
Can you help?
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Anton Ross
In my project Matumba com, I am making a distributed modular system, and I can give limited access to programmers. Each programmer can only deal with a small piece on the test version and does not see the whole picture
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Step 1: always keep your code in your own (private) repository :)
Step 2: if you're paying people to develop your product, ensure that you have a contract for their services, an NDA and Confidentiality and Invention Assignment Agreement
Step 3: sign these documents with your developers
Step 4: add your developer to the repository
Reference for the CIAA: https://www.upcounsel.com/confid...
Oh wow, but this is very common. So to protect yourself, you write a legal document. Spend some money on lawyers, establish a company and create a legal agreement between you and the developer.
BTW, technically its his code, not yours 🤷‍♀️ You must be happy that he is willing to give you a minimal compensation. This is a dog eat dog world.
All the best.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by mutual agreement. However, you should still sign an agreement and this time let your developer earn a percentage of your income.
Register a company and let the developer be a shareholder worth his agreed percentage. That way, you are protected.
If he sells the code to another company, that's a sweet legal case. You'll be rich!
