Potential clients have many factors influencing their decision over which software supplier to use for their development project, and one of the key factors that comes up frequently is the ownership of the intellectual property, ie total ownership of the software we produce. On this point, we are often considered negatively by potential customers because Assanka does not assign the intellectual property of the software we develop to anyone else. Here we explain why, and how it’s in your interest to do it our way.

What IP is

You can’t compare owning intellectual property to owning something tangible like a car, horse or grapefruit. While a carmaker can produce millions of cars and sell each one to a different person, each of whom will own their individual car, only one person can own the knowledge of how to make this particular car.

In the software world, a similar principle applies. While you might only be interested in owning the particular assembly of components required to produce the software product you’ve commissioned, the intellectual property in all those parts comes down to each individual line of code in each of those bits that go into your system.

How our IP makes your system cheaper

Most software systems do the same thing. The value you get from yours might result from some unique arrangement of components, but all the building blocks will have been done millions of times before. Access control, sign-in systems, modules for building tables of data, exporting particular file formats, tools for manipulating video, you name it, someone’s built it. Many of the best examples of these reusable components are in our own code library at Assanka. We built them for other clients, but you’re able to get the benefit of them too, because those clients recognised that our reuse of the components we’d built was no threat to their business and helped us make their projects cheaper.

Who owns what

So then, when we build your system for you, the parts that make up the system as a whole can be broadly filed under these headings:

1. Free software developed by the open source community
2. Third party software used under licence
3. Assanka-developed standard components
4. Bespoke code written specifically for your project

The first two of these represent software that we do not own ourselves, but which we have a right to use, and which you have a right to use as well (we may negotiate this right on your behalf if it’s a third party component). The third category is software we’ve developed and used before, so only the last is code that is genuinely unique to your system. Having said that, it might not be forever, as we might well find a customer in the future that can benefit from some of the code we wrote for you.

Why you actually want a licence

What you want from us is is a complete functional system, and protection of the value it creates for your business. While there might be a minority of your system that we could technically itemise and assign to you, without all the supporting parts that you can never own, the thing simply won’t work. No value there at all.

The value you can protect comes from two parts – first, a licence to use your system (all of it) in perpetuity, and second, a non-competition agreement to ensure that particular arranagement of software cannot be sold by Assanka to a business that competes with your own. In appropriate circumstances we are always willing to discuss a non-compete agreement, but not an IP assignment.

In fact, you should be very careful of those who seek to get your business by promising you intellectual property. Even if they sign a deed of assignment, are you certain they actually have the rights over all the stuff they’re assigning to you? If it’s software for the web, they almost certainly don’t. Wouldn’t you rather deal with a company that takes its legal obligations seriously?

We have no interest in placing contractual strangleholds on our customers, or competing with them. But like all good engineers, we don’t like to fudge things. So you can rely on us to tell it like it is when you ask us about intellectual property.