Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

Your answer is dangerous and your attitude is flippant. You need to seriously rethink both, or you're going to get yourself or someone else in hot water someday.

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But I don't feel like this is primarily a legal issue. It is a negotiation about property. The contracts come into play but the company and you both benefit more from a negotiated agreement than from a fight. It hurts them if you get mad and just quit, fork, give them a PR black-eye, and take the community with you.

So you should: 1. Take your employment contract and ask an attorney to look at it. 2. Ask if this document gives them the right to transfer control of an open-source project to them. 3. Decide if you are willing to quit over this or not.

Once your head is clear on what you are willing to do, it is time to start negotiating...

Hire the attorney to negotiate for you. Don't do it yourself -- you need a 3rd party and lawyers are professional negotiators. Expect to spend some money -- feels roughly like 5-10 hours if it goes quickly. You should be very clear to your company that you are asking a lawyer to negotiate for you because you want to work something out and you feel like it will destroy your relationship with them if you try to do it yourself.

Then get the attorney to discover why they want legal control of a project that is open-source when they already have you as an employee. If they care about the project and just want to influence the roadmap, they could just pay you to work on it full-time and get most of the benefit. If they feel like they need it for other reasons, see if there is an overlap between what you want and what they want. If they just feel like they own everything you do, you need to decide if that's what you signed up for.

Overall, I find it hard to give any better advice because you only presented what you want and not what the company wants. It could be anything from appearances (their investors want them have control) to money (they see a way to make a lot of money from your work). Until you know what the other party wants, you can't really come up with an agreement.

So what exactly do they want when they control the codebase? Do they want to make it closed source, or just more input on the development.

Unless they want to close the source, it sounds to me just like a question of negotiation of aligning your and their interestes and it sounds like you could at least partially support your own product on work time.

And of course, you need to balance any theoretical gains by winning a legal argument with your company with your long-term employment interests.

I have issues with the GNU assignment. It means that we're reliant on future owners of the GNU project to not ever relicense the codebase. A single owner is a single point of failure.