311–320 of 327 posts
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it's the same in UK, EU and Australian law.
No it is not. In Germany, you need to make a new contract with explicit payment https://www.urheberrecht-leipzig.de/urheberrecht-nutzungsrec...
As a company owner, as soon as I read, "I've developed it on my own time but the product directly relates to what my employer does" > "Directly relates to what my employer does" You will face multiple charges. You have no IDEA - how brutal it can be in court. In 99% case - You will fail mostly because - you built your company competitor while working in a company that is more likely to become your future competitor i…
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Listen to this person. The people telling you to talk to your employer are giving you terrible advice. You can still do that after spending 30 minutes with a lawyer, but you can't take back anything you say before you talk to a lawyer.
Always always always talk to a lawyer. If your dog walker (at the peak of their career) friend was like “I need a website” you wouldn’t be like “learn JavaScript” you would say find a programmer. If I had 10 dollars for every time I had to spend weeks convincing an engineer friend to talk to an attorney and then when they finally did it got dealt with in 30 minutes... Lawyers are just “full stack law architects” do y…
Since your project is open source, you should try to evaluate whether your employer could benefit financially from suing you to gain control of your open source project. If not, then they are less likely to do so. Also, you should factor in the PR/reputation cost to the company. If they're in the open source space anyway, it would be bad PR for them if they tried to suppress or discourage the independent open source…
If, as many have speculated, OP has signed a contract making this work the employer's property, then I would guess that it is not open source and never was - it would be like OP declaring the work he did in his day job as open source, and then making it public.
If companies could claim ownership over all their employees' personal open source work done during their private time, there would be no open source projects today.
I just do corporate politics by first being an employee who does everything within reason to help the work progress. Eventually this builds towards managers acting in my interest. If they fail to do that I start removing myself from such extra activities. If you wrote some great software they can use you should transfer it since they will find ways to reward you for doing such things... unless you know they wont, then you have to be a pain in the ass while reminding them what you've already selflessly done for them.
Just be sure you are a nice guy and ask yourself if they are nice to you. If not, can you condition them to be nice? If not, take the legal route for everything.
I would suggest you first think about what you want (financial, recognition, etc.) and then have a conversation with the company about it. As you point out, the company has an incentive to keep you happy! So, start with a discussion here. I personally believe that going to a lawyer at this stage is 1) expensive and 2) unnecessarily confrontational. I understand the argument about understanding your legal options, but…
Best case, you both win.
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If, as many have speculated, OP has signed a contract making this work the employer's property, then I would guess that it is not open source and never was - it would be like OP declaring the work he did in his day job as open source, and then making it public.
It depends on whether the employee worked on it during company time, whether the employee was asked by the employer to work on it and how closely the work aligns with the employer's business. If companies could claim ownership over all their employees' personal open source work done during their private time, there would be no open source projects today.
Yes, that was my point - it is not a certainty (and so any advice beginning "since your project is open source..." might be based on a misconception.)
>...whether the employee worked on it during company time, whether the employee was asked by the employer to work on it and how closely the work aligns with the employer's business.
It actually depends on the terms of OP's contract and whether the relevant clauses (if any) are enforcible in the appropriate jurisdiction. The factors you mention may be a factor in whether this is open source (and we already know, from OP, that it does align with the employer's business), but the "but if..." argument of your second paragraph is unlikely to carry much weight, legally. This is why OP should speak to a lawyer if she is dissatisfied with the employer's proposal.
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It can be the same thing in Europe, at least the contracts I've seen say so.
Just because it's there in the contract doesn't mean it's legal. I'm not sure which European country you are referring to, but as a German I'd look at you funny if you had the audacity to put something like that in an employment contract (but honestly, I very strongly doubt any employer would do so in the first place).
No, but should be likely that it is, right? Not worth the risk to put such clauses in there otherwise. And I was talking about the UK.