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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?

#321

Post by yowlingcat »

runninganyways wrote: post #299
yowlingcat wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are you wrong, but you're being dramatic and deflecting criticism. People being "shitty" when you ask for legal advice online or not is a complete red herring because it is an inappropriate and dangerous substitution. Fiverr? Are you kidding? You can get a fairly cheap half hour consultation of some kind with many a good lawyer for a few hundred dollars AT MOST and it will not be a waste of time. There's onl…

It's pretty clear that you're in read-only mode. You think you know the only answer so what can I tell you.

I've had a lot of conversations about this lately, but my tolerance for this kind of ignorance ends where the possible damage begins. You are directly leading someone down a dangerous course and playing with fire. Feel free to make that choice for yourself if you really want to, but don't expect to give this poor advice to others in a public forum without a reality check.

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

#322

Post by JohnFen »

iamcreasy wrote: post #272
JohnFen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> time-limited exclusive license to any side project I do that does overlap with their activities Thank you for your answer. Could you please elaborate on this one? What does the exclusive license entails? Do you get ownership back when the time expires?

I never relinquish ownership -- that's nonnegotiable for me. The concession I'm talking about here is that the contract specifies that I retain ownership and copyright, but I commit to offering my employer the option to exclusively license it from me for a limited period of time. What the limit should be is open for negotiation, although I prefer that the limit isn't specified in the employment contract, but that it gets negotiated should the employer actually want the license.

When the exclusive period is up, that doesn't mean the license is inoperative, only that I am free to license it to others as well.

Note that when I say "I" here, I really mean my attorney. These sorts of things can be tricky, and I am no lawyer. Also, it's very hard to make this sort of thing foolproof -- if an employer wants to screw me, there are a few ways that they could.

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

#323

Post by JohnFen »

kelnos wrote: post #76
rubicon33 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Blanket "we own everything" statements should never be accepted, ever. That's a value judgment that others might not share. Also, that's easy to say if you have a steady, secure job that pays well. But if you don't, and you need a job else you might not make your next rent payment, maybe you can't be so picky. Same deal if all the desirable jobs in your area have clauses like that and you can't or don't want to mov…

> if you don't, and you need a job else you might not make your next rent payment, maybe you can't be so picky.

Yes. Early in my career, I had been in this situation a couple of times. What I did then (and would do again) is to suspend any work on such private projects entirely until I can find a job with a more reasonable employer.

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

#324

Post by JohnFen »

derekp7 wrote: post #33
JohnFen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 voluntee…

In my opinion, it's better to ensure that you have the right to do whatever you want, and reap the benefits of that, if what you're doing does not compete with your employer. That way, you're covered with OSS projects as well as any others.

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

#325

Post by miraculixx »

yolo42 wrote: post #22
masukomi wrote: post #18

> I created product on the side as a side project in my own time and it has become a huge hit in the community to a point where my employers wants me to transfer the code-base over. The company does OSS and my side-project is also Open-Source. Let me restate this: You had an idea you were so interested in you created it in your off time. You made it open source. Your company likes it so much they want to contribute t…

It is not that they want me to spend work time on it. They want me to transfer ownership of the project to them. That's the part that I do not wish to do. The way things work at this place, I'll probably end up maintaining the product until I leave my job. The reason for not transferring over is that once I do that, they will essentially not let me create features that I think can be done better using my product, bec…

> they will essentially not let me create features that I think can be done better using my product, because they exist in some other product

sounds like you created a competing product and made it open source. that spells trouble. Get a lawyer. IANAL

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

#326

Post by mch82 »

ghaff wrote: post #232
mch82 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically a combo of GPL and taking community contributions without having them assign copyright to you is the most full proof way to keep something open source. Sorry, but your advice is refuted by research. Both GNU and Apache ask developers to sign contributor licensing agreements. For Apache, see “ASF Contributor Agreements”, https://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html . For GNU, see “Copyright…

Opinions differ on CLAs. There are certainly arguments for them as laid out in that article. There are also arguments against them in many cases, including that they create friction for new contributors. "Oh, I have to sign this agreement which means talking to my company's legal staff? I think I'll just pass." The parent is also probably right that GPL with no CLA makes it much harder to change a project's license.…

Your podcast is very good! I recommended the series to a friend who manages an open source project. Looking forward to your other interviews.

In the podcast episode, the guest does mention people are moving away from CLAs. He goes on to say projects are adopting a “Developer Certificate of Origin” model. I found an article that helped me start to understand differences in these models: “CLA vs. DCO: What's the difference?”, https://opensource.com/article/18/3/cla-vs-dco-whats-differe....

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

#327

Post by webmaven »

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…

There are other forms of compensation, such as more vacation time, company-sponsored attendance (ie. membership, travel, and lodging) at industry events, a continuing education budget, a private office, higher company matching funds for your 401k, etc.

Think "perks" rather than "salary".

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