Writing a Contract for GPL'd Code?

An anonymous reader wonders: "I am working as an independent developer for a client I have a long relationship with, and of whom I used to be an employee. I've made informal contracts in the past for development work, but this job is much more significant. Also, the client has gone to court over software development in the past; he was in the right to do so, but I need to cover myself. The product will be released under the (L)GPL and copyrighted by me, and the client will also be agreeing to open the license and give me the copyright on some code I previously developed. I plan to consult a lawyer, but I just want a little more direction before I start investing hours. Are there any resources I should know about, beyond what the FSF has to offer?"

Re:Something doesn't sound right.

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

It is unusual in that it sounds to me like a company that "gets it". The company likely just wants to use the code in their business, but is not in the software business. Amazon was an early contributor to apache, because they needed a web server to run their business.

I have been in a situation where the only software available for a business need cost in the middling six digit territory, and managed to replace this application with some about 10000 lines of python scripting. Do I want to sell this application? It is not my business (we are not even a development shop, not enough of a team, need marketing, etc...) Do I want to maintain it forever? If I open source it, there is a chance that outside people will help. If we keep it in-house, we are just condemned to supporting it forever. It does not cost us anything to use a public svn repository, people have to get to whatever the development process is.

The company could be making widgets, and just need software that runs them. This could be a driver, or it could be some packaging around a linux distro for some appliance. 99% of the code would be GPL in such a case, maintaining the 1% contributed by this guy would likely just make for bad publicity if they only release the 99%.

Write it simple

[nuggz]

Write out simply what you want, and see a lawyer.
It should only take a few minutes.

Everything you listed in the summary:

[JoshJ]

All that stuff- even the old code being released under the GPL and the copyright officially belonging to you (it's likely that it was not specified originally, and there could be an issue over it in the future if it isn't specified now)- all of it should go in the contract.

IANAL, so what you should do is write down everything you want in the contract, put the thing aside for a day, make sure you didn't forget anything, think about it for another day, then call the lawyer and explain the situation to him and show him the paper.