The Nivenly Foundation leverages the software licensing grant terms originally called out by the ASF (Apache Software Foundation).
The Nivenly Foundation suggests both corporations and individual contributors to review the Balanced Employee IP Agreement BEIPA originally created by GitHub, Inc which takes a balanced approach to assigning control of intellectual property (IP) created by an employee.
The employee maintains exclusive control of IP created outside of their job and not related to the company's business. For IP created outside of an employee's job but related to the company's business, the employee maintains ownership and the company gets a non-exclusive and unlimited license. A company using BEIPA doesn't try to claim control of an employee's free time knowledge production, nor does it try to extend company control past the period of employment. Think of BEIPA as a commitment to employee autonomy and "work-life balance" – for the mind.
The terms in BEIPA are written in a way that any corporation can adopt the policy. The BEIPA policy specifically aligns with the values of The Nivenly Foundation and our continued pursuit of open source sustainability.