How to fulfill an order and not transfer the rights to the entire code to the customer?

Question

open source

I have experience to create a chat. I spent over 300 man hours of personal time on them. A customer came to me and wants to order a chat.

How to make a deal so that the rights to my code that I wrote before receiving the order are not transferred to the customer? Since the amount of the order is small and I want to use my code in my other projects as well.

I think the most reliable way would be to publish my work on github. And then the project will not be the development of a chat, but the refinement of the finished chat.

But I have not yet decided whether to publish all the giblets of the project in the public domain. And what other options are there with a minimum of bureaucracy?

#UDP

So it's not the piracy of my code that worries me. Since no one in their right mind will fork a project with a bunch of code and no documentation. But I want to protect myself from potential claims from a customer who wants to save money without ordering a design, and I have no idea what he will say if he sees almost the same application next to it with almost the same design.

Answer 1

Everything is much simpler, sell the finished product to the client, not its code base. Adobe doesn't sell Photoshop source to customers.