Comment by anilakar
7 years ago
While I was working as an assistant researcher three years ago, my contract also considered all research-derived knowledge uni property. In this case, pretty much anything tangentially related to HTTP performance enhancements would have been claimable by them.
It the software is GPL, and you use it for your company/university to do work with, that is a very dubious claim and more likely falsifiable in court.
GPL is a license applied to a work by the copyright owner after (or at the time of) creation. It has nothing to do with authorship of the work and who owns the copyright.
To elaborate, even if GP developed code as part of a GPL project, the copyright owner could prevent him/her from distributing that code to anyone else, whether that distribution occurs under the GPL or any other license.