Agaric's policy on releasing code

[We wrote this to a potential new client in 2007.]

I do want to address one item in the request for information early on:

"All business plan, content and code are confidential and are to be owned by
the client and released at their sole discretion."

The only issue here is with "code".

Agaric Design Collective does work made possible by open source free
software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Drupal and more). We would be hesitant
to do any custom, modular extensions to Drupal (known simply as modules)
without the intention that they be contributed back to the community that
makes powerful sites like the one we build possible. Nor, of course, does
our implementing Drupal and contributed modules transfer ownership in any way.

[The client] will own the code for the custom theme and possibly some other
mission-specific code.

For more advanced custom functionality, such as may be the best approach for
a resource directory or more sophisticated e-mail alerts, we expect to
implement it as a module with code that will be hosted on Drupal.org under
the GNU license. (Alternately, by extending existing modules that are
already maintained this way.)

[The client] benefits from having an entire community of developers and users
evaluating and improving the code. We would of course credit [the client] as the sponsor of the module.

There are myriad arguments, political and practical, for open source free
software. I can go on at much greater length but I'm not expecting our
approach to present any problems for [the client]; I just wanted to be clear.