Comment by ryandrake

4 months ago

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.

6 comments

ryandrake

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BrandoElFollito  4 months ago

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.

  • ihattendorf  4 months ago

    > 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.

socalgal2  4 months ago

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.

  • bsimpson  4 months ago

    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.