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

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

#31

Post by caseysoftware »

enz wrote: post #4

If your project is OSS, what prevents them from taking it and "force you" (as an employee) to work on it anyway? Maybe a restrictive license may help: if your company takes the code and modify it, make them under the obligation of releasing the source code too. What is the current license of your project? Ultimately, nothing prevents you from deleting your public Git repo. You can decide that your project is not avai…

If they have even a debatable claim on the code (probably not but are you 100% sure?), then deleting it is destroying their property.

That's a quick way to have a miserable life (getting fired, sued, blacklisted among peers, etc).

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

#32

Post by nl »

What kind of outcome do you want?

Most of the responses here concentrate on trying to get some kind of financial return for your work.

That's important, but for you it might not be the most important thing (you were giving it away and working on it in your spare time, right?)

Consider asking to make it your full time job, or something like that. You clearly know the field well, and you've managed to build community. Having the company resources behind you and the responsibility to run the project like you want might be an outcome that interests you.

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

#33

Post by derekp7 »

JohnFen wrote: post #12
mcv wrote: post #6

Whether or not your employer can claim ownership in court depends entirely on your contract. But no matter what's in your contact, that route is probably not your best option. From what I understand, you created, in your own time, a project that is valuable to your employer, and that they want to use and develop. You're the expert on this project. Not just that, you designed every aspect of it, popularised it, and yo…

> Whether or not your employer can claim ownership in court depends entirely on your contract. Entirely this. I got burned by this years ago, developing side project that was completely unrelated to the sort of work my employer did, and was not developed using any company resources. But my employment contract specified that my employer had first rights to anything I developed at all during the term of my employment.…

It's been a while since I was at a company that had that clause in it, but if I was in that situation in the future then at the minimum I'd want to ensure that I could still work on open source projects on my own. I was wondering what is the best way to phrase this with a potential employer (esp. if you are out of work, and desperately need that job)?

I was thinking along the lines of "Hey, I periodically do volunteer work for various charities, and I think this clause could hurt them. Could we add in that work not directly assigned to me and is related to a non-profit / charity is excluded from this clause?"

That way, if anything comes up, you could turn over copyright to the FSF or similar organization and you would be covered.

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

#34

Post by rubicon33 »

JohnFen wrote: post #12
mcv wrote: post #6

Whether or not your employer can claim ownership in court depends entirely on your contract. But no matter what's in your contact, that route is probably not your best option. From what I understand, you created, in your own time, a project that is valuable to your employer, and that they want to use and develop. You're the expert on this project. Not just that, you designed every aspect of it, popularised it, and yo…

> Whether or not your employer can claim ownership in court depends entirely on your contract. Entirely this. I got burned by this years ago, developing side project that was completely unrelated to the sort of work my employer did, and was not developed using any company resources. But my employment contract specified that my employer had first rights to anything I developed at all during the term of my employment.…

> I got burned by this years ago, developing side project that was completely unrelated to the sort of work my employer did, and was not developed using any company resources. But my employment contract specified that my employer had first rights to anything I developed at all during the term of my employment.

Seriously? Did you not read the contract?

Most contracts specifically say that the work has to be RELATED to whatever you're doing at your day job. Blanket "we own everything" statements should never be accepted, ever.

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

#35

Post by duxup »

relaunched wrote: post #23

Find a lawyer, ASAP, that specializes in employment and / or IP. This is a legal issue and you need to solve it with people that know the law. Talking, signing, admitting things, etc, only hurt you. Depending on your country and state, as well as your employment agreement, there are a lot of impactful variables. Intuition and personal relationships are not going to help you solve this issue, especially, absent knowin…

Yup.

He needs someone who understands the law and the specifics, and who has his interests in mind.

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

#36

Post by nwallin »

relaunched wrote: post #23

Find a lawyer, ASAP, that specializes in employment and / or IP. This is a legal issue and you need to solve it with people that know the law. Talking, signing, admitting things, etc, only hurt you. Depending on your country and state, as well as your employment agreement, there are a lot of impactful variables. Intuition and personal relationships are not going to help you solve this issue, especially, absent knowin…

This, a million times this.

We can't even begin to think about the answers to this question with knowing what state the employer and/or poster are in. Nor can we begin to think about it without the specifics of the application and the field that the employer develops in. The ultimate conclusion of this will ultimately boil down to minutiae. Minutiae that we are neither privy to nor have the knowledge or experience to reasonably discuss.

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

#37

Post by Papirola »

yolo42 wrote: post #8
mcv wrote: post #6

Whether or not your employer can claim ownership in court depends entirely on your contract. But no matter what's in your contact, that route is probably not your best option. From what I understand, you created, in your own time, a project that is valuable to your employer, and that they want to use and develop. You're the expert on this project. Not just that, you designed every aspect of it, popularised it, and yo…

Thank you for your comments! This would have been natural but the timing of this could not be worse. I just got a raise (last week) and I doubt they will consider anything more. They gave me a raise because I was doing good work for other things. I've serious doubts that there would be any financial barter possible. I'll probably the lead for the project and my managers are fine with that. Promotion is something that…

looks like you've outgrown your workplace.

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

#39

Post by greggman2 »

IANAL and I'm sure this will get downvoted since people won't like what I have to say.

I'd concentrate on the positive rather than the negative, that if you get to work on this project via your employer from this point on you'll be getting paid to do the thing you were doing for free.

Getting paid for past work seems unlikely. You already admitted you didn't care about compensation by open sourcing the project. You were willing to give it to anyone, including your own company as open source. Not that you can't ask, maybe they'll be nice about it, but just saying it's strange that before they asked you were giving it away for free to any company and now that they asked you want compensation.

To be harsh you arguably did something wrong by making something that directly competes with your employer. It doesn't matter that it was on your own time. It's called a "Duty of Loyalty" and basically means you can't get paid as an employee and at the same time stab them in the back by competing with them.

https://www.google.com/search?q=duty%20of%20loyalty%20employ...

Maybe you don't think it competes but you said yourself it directly relates to what they do so yes, as you admitted, you've cornered yourself in a bad place.

Some companies, like Google, have an easy way to get a signed contract saying they will not claim interest in your project before you start (or they'll point out it's a conflict of interest like if you said you wanted to make a cloud based mail service ... in which case my guess is they would try to get you to join the gmail team, contribute to it, or you could quit and start your cloud based emails start up). The point is they are upfront about the legal issues and provide a way to work out a solution. Most companies don't have a procedure for this until it's too late.

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

#40

Post by ronilan »

Every once in a while something like this comes up in HN and the top voted answer is always “find a lawyer”.

My 2 cents - don’t.

You want compensation, you want to direct the roadmap. Your employer wants ownership. Where is the conflict?

Why make one?

(P.S. - my legal experience “peaked” about a decade ago when I hired Andrew Valentine, managing partner of DLA Piper Palo Alto to help bridge what should have been an easy win-win. We ended with a whole lot of losers. I got a full refund, though, so yah.)

(Also - Andrew, in case you read this, you never sent me the invoice for the out-of-pocket expenses you paid to UPS documents to San Bruno. I’d be happy to pay those. Contact in profile.)

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