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

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

#1

Post by yolo42 »

Hello everyone,

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.

I've developed it on my own time but the product directly relates to what my employer does so I've sort of cornered myself in a bad place. In hindsight, I also made some mistakes in how I went about evangelizing it.

Ideally, I want to keep the ownership with myself but I doubt that is going to work out.

I think what I want is: - to be compensated in some form for all the time I've put in over the last two years - to have control over the product roadmap (this I'm fairly confident won't happen in the way I want in the long run)

What are my options here? What should I ask for here? I don't have much clue as to what can I ask for here so any suggestions would be helpful. People at my company generally wants to work things out to keep everyone happy to some degree.

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

#4

Post by enz »

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 available anymore, it is your right.

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

#5

Post by bdcravens »

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…

Deleting the code or putting a restrictive license in place doesn't change the terms of the employment contract if it has terms stating that they have IP to work done while working there.

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

#6

Post by mcv »

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 your employer apparently likes it enough to want it. These are valuable skills. At the very least, this should imply a nice raise. Perhaps a promotion. You're the natural PO and the natural lead developer for this project.

I would discuss this with your employer. See if they're willing to give you a nice promotion with this project as your primary responsibility and an accompanying raise. Maybe a bonus too.

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

#8

Post by yolo42 »

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 I've considered either so thank you for that suggestion.

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

#9

Post by codegeek »

"the product directly relates to what my employer does"

Depending on your employment contract, this could be tricky for you. If your employer is nice about this and they want to encourage you, I would use this opportunity to negotiate something here which creates win-win for both. Clearly, they see a lot of value in this codebase so instead of turning this into a conflict, sell yourself to your employer. You can definitely ask for leadership control over it. Not sure if monetarily, you can get anything but worth a try.

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