Severance Agreement And General Release: Fill & Download for Free

Before providing a substantive answer, I must wonder: If your startup is represented by a law firm, why are you double-checking its work on Quora?Disclaimer in addition to the standard disclaimer: This answer is not intended to interfere with or displace your company's relationship with its existing legal counsel.The CXO's requested change would put the agreement way outside the mainstream. I have worked on many similar agreements, and no one has suggested a reciprocal release. If the CXO insists on reciprocity, I would be concerned about his or her suitability for the position and the company.Furthermore, it is quite possible that a release of CXO liability would not be fully enforceable. You have not specified the jurisdiction, but, in all likelihood, the CXO will have fiduciary obligations under applicable law, and those obligations probably cannot be waived by contract.Indeed, any directors who approved such a waiver may, themselves, have acted contrary to their own fiduciary obligations!

If your advisor has collaborators who are going to attempt to steal your work, you have much, much bigger problems than what’s in your source code.The novelty of your thesis is in the ideas. The code is merely a way of testing those ideas. It’s similar to an experimental thesis in physics. Showing someone the lab apparatus you are using isn’t nearly as important as discussing the ideas that the apparatus is designed to test.Since your advisor has presumably already discussed the ideas, if the collaborator is going to steal your ideas, they already likely know enough to do that if they know enough to want your code.Much more likely, assuming your advisor isn’t a naive idiot, they will build on your code to expand the larger system in some way. (This could be by writing more code, by running some experiments in another area, or doing something else that is out of scope of what you are doing.) That’s going to be good for you in that they will then publish papers, possibly with you as a co-author, which will bring more attention to your system and your work.As others have noted, there may also be intellectual property (IP) questions. If you are in the US, there’s a relatively good chance that you don’t own the IP anyway, in which case it doesn’t matter. If you do, it’s worth having a brief discussion with someone who knows about IP only if you believe the ideas are such that you might be interested in forming a company or otherwise licensing the IP in the future. (In particular, for patents, in the US, public disclosure is an issue. However, if done properly, you will be able to argue that giving code to a collaborator with restrictions on redistribution is not public disclosure.) In any other case, more exposure is better.In any case, I’d be tempted, when sending the code and with the agreement of your advisor, to send a “cover letter” that tells them where to get the code and also that states the purposes for which you are providing them the code (e.g. to extend and perform other experiments in the context of the collaboration being performed). My goal there would be less legal and more simply to make sure that everyone has a common understanding of the collaboration. The idea is to avoid bad feelings if the collaborators believe, for example, that you are generally releasing the code when you have the intent to share it only with them.Edited to add: I’ve gotten several comments suggesting ways that one can protect the intellectual property, particularly as embodied in the code. Let me suggest that people with that point of view write answers. A careful read of my answer will show that my belief is that the code itself is probably of low value and that the ideas may have more value, but the value to a grad student is in dissemination. Beyond that, if this question is from the rare grad student with an immediately businessworthy idea, the advisor has probably already messed up any possible patent or similar IP claims. So, overall, annoying the advisor by getting a lawyer or claiming trade secret status or other approaches is likely to annoy someone with great power while bringing no benefit at all.

Above are some pics of the last resting places of approximately 5,000 Axis POW’s taken at Stalingrad. In a mass grave - in a disused quarry - in the city of Astrakhan - in the far south of Russia —- where the Volga flows into a vast delta before reaching the Caspian Sea.From far left to right:- Romania, Hungary, Germany (and others in the Wehrmacht) Italy.The gravestones in the distance are of Russian/Soviet citizens buried in the HUGE civilian cemetery adjoining the quarry —- which nowadays adjoins a very large railway marshaling yard.They ARE NOT part of the POW burial site.To answer the question :-Rather hellish, most of them started immediately they were rounded up, no sorting or debriefing, just MARCH !!!! - on long forced marches through the day and night with little rest and almost no food (other than what they had in their possession when captured) trying to keep themselves and their comrades warm, alive and moving forward while hearing the frequent single shots that indicated another comrade - who simply could not keep going - had been summarily executed by the ‘convoy’ (escorting guards). Eventually they might have reached a major collection point some considerable distance from the Cauldron itself, and from where they were first taken into custody, where they would be screened and processed by the NKVD and SMERSH.Interesting book to read is Adelbert Holl’s ‘After Stalingrad: Seven Years as a Soviet Prisoner of War’ who also wrote an ‘Artilleryman in Stalingrad’.Holl seems to have been a rather committed true believer in Germany’s and Hitler’s cause if some of his comments are analysed a little.For example I really could not understand why the prisoner-doctor who nursed him back to health in one of the many camps he passed through had to be referred to as Jewish, enough in my opinion to simply refer to him as a doctor.Comments about the facial features and bearing of his guards were also, to me at least, counter sympathetic.Holl also seemed to me to be a bit of a complainer in ‘An Artilleryman in Stalingrad’ frequently referring to his ‘victimization’ by his commanding officer who blamed him for every misfortune that befell his battery.Well that is what junior officers are for are they not — especially in strict discipline armies like the German WW2 army.????????But nevertheless ‘After Stalingrad’ is quite an informative read.Holl, in my opinion, had a pretty easy time of it in captivity compared to other memoirs I have read— even being sent to a Black Sea camp in the late 40’s and 1950 for ‘fattening up’ prior to his release and repatriation to Germany. Which repatriation was BTW ahead of the general release agreement negotiated with Moscow by Konrad Adenauer.He claims to have ‘stared down’ his guards and their superiors on several occasions when demanding better treatment for himself and his fellow officers.Cheers