Impartial Bargain

Arguments given by Santhosh and Kaushik are correct in the context mention in their posts.

As the current theme is about open source development, let’s look into the matter from a different perspective. If we take the example of software industry, we can easily justify weather the employee has used physical resources like computer systems, company funds, time from his working hours or not but we can never differentiate and justify weather intellectual resources used by the employee like work experience on a particular technology, domain knowledge, best practices and processes, managerial assistance in job work which might have been essential inputs used in his development work doesn’t belong to his employer. Such resources are provided to the employees during the term of the employment with the organisation and claims for ownership of these resources may not be possible. In such cases, I feel, due credit should also be given to the employer for the same even such terms and conditions are not clearly dictated in the contract. Without using such resources, might be, development of such work would not have been possible.