Comment by greyface-
4 months ago
I tried to open source a weekend personal project while at $BIGCO via their "Invention Assignment Review Committee". It turned into a minor bureaucratic nightmare and I was ultimately never given the OK to release it, or any clarity over whether my employer was choosing to assert an IP ownership interest in it. In retrospect, I wish I had never notified them of its existence, and released it under a pseudonym instead.
Whenever I join a company I always create a bunch of made up names on my “prior inventions” list. When I open source something I just name it after something I put on my list if the description is close enough.
That is insanely clever. Love it.
^^^^ Excellent idea and thinking ahead.
Great suggestion to make in advance placeholders to contain side projects.
Do you think your colleagues have the same ideas of what is honest and trustworthy behavior?
In what ways do you trust, and not trust, your colleagues?
How do you feel about that?
What do colleagues have to do with anything?
The better question is in what ways do you trust, and not trust, the company you work for?
And the answer to that can be very complicated, and depend on the company a great deal. It also depends on who might buy the company in the future, and they might not be trustworthy at all.
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I trust them to mind their own business and I do the same for them.
The people approving this stuff are your bosses, not your colleagues.
In California you can just open source it and do not need permission as long as you did it on personal time on personal hardware without referencing proprietary IP.
Sure, a company could not like you doing that and find a reason to fire you, but they have no valid legal recourse and you may even be able to sue them for wrongful termination.
We are one of the only states that prevents employers from having ownership of your brain on personal time.
Corpos have tried to claim ownership of things I did in my personal time, multiple times. I just show them this law and they back down immediately.
Having rights to my own brain is a big reason I live in California, cost of living be damned.
https://california.public.law/codes/labor_code_section_2870
IANAL, but know your rights!
There are two exceptions listed on 2870, the first one is going to be the gotcha. It excludes inventions that:
> (1)Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;
So, if you work at $BIGCO, they will argue that since they have their fingers in everything, that anything you might work on "relates" to their business or actual or demonstrably anticipated R&D. This is a truck-sized loophole.
Ah, fair. More great reasons to never work for a megacorpo.
There is not a paycheck big enough to make me give up the freedom to do whatever I want with my personal engineering time.
I have only worked for employers that do just one thing, so this law offers me lots of protection.
Note that this is also an enormous part of the reason why CA is a world tech hub. I hear other US states claiming they want to build a similar reputation. “So, you’ll pass laws giving employees ownership of their own personal projects they make on their own time?” “LOL, no!” “Alright, good luck Tupelo.”
The other big reason is their glorious refusal to honor non-compete clauses. As I understand it, this was a big reason a lot of tech companies moved from Boston to CA back in the day.
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I bring this up constantly, even to the point of trying to figure out if US states can have "embassies" in other US states.
I was once advised to take a vacation to California every year and do all my thinking then. But I hate wasting fuel, and it'd be so much more fun to say "this little park in the middle of Detroit is actually California soil", and just walk down there every few weeks with my notepad, and ponder what problems need solving and how.
Wait, other states claim ownership of personal projects made in their own time? How in the world is that legal?
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Whenever I see someone on HN talking about their moonlighting or side/hobby project, I get chills and think to myself "Boy, I hope they don't work for $BIGCO, because in all likelihood their existing employer claims IP ownership over that work, and if they ever try to do anything substantial with it, they're going to have corporate lawyers on their case."
I've had experience with a similar "committee" (probably same company) and I concluded the safest path is to just not do side projects while employed with BigTech.
This is insane. When I am out of work in France, I am out of work. Sure, I cannot write software that competes with my company but unrelated open source that does not being me income - yes.
> I cannot write software that competes with my company
That can be difficult when you work for a company that has it's fingers in almost everything.
Some companies are far more open than others. Google has tons of open source projects both through Google and via personal projects. Apple on the otherhand mostly forbids personal projects period, or so I've been told.
I haven't open sourced anything in a while, but at Google it's historically been pretty easy so long as you let Google put itself as the copyright holder and aren't in any legal minefields (e.g. emulators). You can actually look up the Google Open Source docs even if you don't work there.
That's why so many repos say "Not an official Google product." That's the boilerplate of someone's side project that got open sourced, but Google wanted to claim copyright.
Or live in California where forced assignment of personal time IP is illegal.
With an exception that is important if you work at $BIGCO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44803482
Ugh, you gave me bad flashbacks of the same committee.
I tried to re-license a previously-released project (like from GPL to MIT or similar) and they wouldn't budge. I had written all the code.
In the end, I decided that them suing (or firing) me to assert their ownership of $VALUELESS_PROJECT, so they could then license it back, was ridiculously unlikely, said fuck it, and did it. And I was right.
the problem isn't your risk, the problem is the risk of the users of the project. if the code is owned by the company, your re-licensing isn't legal, and that could put other companies using it at risk.
Right, but, they never owned it, and would never attempt to assert that. So in hindsight (and similar to GP) compliance was a worse and more frustrating option than simply never mentioning things.