[mundacho]

I recently started freelancing so I bought a standard contract for the Swiss market where I'm based. There is a clause for the copyright and licence that basically says:

- I keep the intellectual property for the code that I developed myself.

- If I use third party software or libraries, the owners of the libraries are keep all their rights.

- The client gets all rights to use, copy, and modify the software I provide. Basically, there are no restrictions on the use they can do of it within their company. I give them exclusive rights to that software and I cannot sell the same software to another client without consulting with them.

There are other clauses that are there, but those are the three I judge more important. It is important to keep the intellectual property because that way I can always reuse snippets of the software I developed in other projects.

[JoshTriplett]

That's also a potential point of negotiation: a contract to develop software for exclusive use should charge a higher rate than a contract to develop software that can be subsequently released as Open Source.