As far as I remember, the author of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Pro...

Recommended a scheme to shield OSS developers from liability. I am not a lawyer, so it looked a bit overly cautious to me, but it seems that was a good idea.

Creating your own foundation is a huge amount of work. I think you would benefit from doing this research, and I'm not going to tell you "don't do it" because it won't be convincing, but I predict that in the end you will not choose to start a foundation.

There's a chapter in Van Lindberg's Intellectual Property and Open Source on this topic. (It ends with a discussion of umbrella foundations like Apache, Eclipse, Software Freedom Conservancy.) Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

Agreed. Nolo books are very basic.

The following is much better and does talk about many corner cases. It also is written specifically for the software-development case.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

The book is written by software developers turned lawyers, and provided me with some fresh perspectives on the nature of the law itself.

Legally speaking, merely mentioning it to your boss does not necessarily shield you from a lawsuit. It certainly reduces the likeliness though in my opinion (i.e., have no data).

Further, "employer's line of business" is very loosely defined. If you could share the technical skills between your job and the side project, you are most likely in the same line of business.

Here's a book I highly recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

It depends deeply on the project. Some something like, say, an HTTP API wrapper module, MIT/BSD style licenses are quite sufficient. There shouldn't be something patentable there. Apache, unfortunately, isn't compatible with GPL v2.

But if you're building something like node.js, nginx, or Lucene, choosing MIT/BSD is likely a terrible idea. Apache gives huge protections for unforeseen scenarios: automatic property rights assignment for contributions, poison-pill–like protections against patent suits, &c.

I highly recommend this book on Proprietary Information and Open Source: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

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Aside — Sean, I took your CS101 class in '07. Crazy running into you randomly here ;)

I found this to be an excellent resource for this topic.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

While this has "open source" in the title, it's still an excellent book related to this topic.

Another good thing about this book is that it draws analogies between software source code and law statutes, making it very easy for software folks to understand these legal issues.

Intellectual Property and Open Source. It is a must-read for anyone starting a business or working on an open source project.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960/