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I think even more clarification may be necessary regarding the business
relationship between your company and these clients.
For instance, does your company contract with these clients to provide
products that the client will own??
The US federal government typically asks for documentation on diskette along
with written documentation and the product created for it, or even if it is
a proposal. Such documentation should be priced into the quote provided to
the government before work is even started.
If these clients own the product, and they're paying your company to develop
the product AND documentation, the product is rightly theirs. The price to
provide documentation on diskette should be negligible. You're spending a
few minutes and a few dollars to copy something over ($20-$50??). It's the
effort you put into the documentation itself that is costly and should be
priced into the entire project cost.
If they don't own the product, that's an entirely different matter, and I
agree with Eric, the legal department should be working toward an agreement
on how it should be used, for whom it can be distributed to, any
compensation for distribution at their discretion, etc., etc...
Debbie Molis
Technical Writer
dmolis -at- mlj -dot- com
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