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Developers’ side projects

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Developers’ side projects

#301

Post by nsb1 »

chrisan wrote: post #291
ImTalking wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't quite understand Joel's point. Regardless of whether you are legally right, a larger company could sue you for the sake of suing, and make your life very miserable. And if the fight continues and you run out of money, what then? I had exactly that thing. I was being bought-out and a small client decided (against the contract that they had signed) that the changes we had made to our mortgage broker commissio…

> And if the fight continues and you run out of money, what then? How does this work? I always hear the "sue you until you run out of money" type of bullying. Why do you need to pay lots of money for a lawyer if you are in the right? * I worked on my project at night: here is my git log * I worked on my personal laptop * Your business is automated cars and my side project is a T shirt sale website

Sadly, unless you really know what you're doing, you have to pay a lawyer to respond to their lawyers, and that process can be dragged out in any number of ways, either intentionally or just because the system has a lot of process and red tape.

In addition, they can request to do things like: - Request a court order to stop you from doing any further side work until the case is settled - Depose all your friends and co-workers - Seize all your equipment for analysis - Change the venue to another state if corporate HQ isn't where you live, requiring travel for you (and your lawyers) for meetings

You can, of course, object to all this in front of a judge...but that requires a lawyer too.

This all adds up over time, and every phone call, letter, meeting, or appearance in court costs hundreds of dollars per hour (and usually billed in whole-hour increments) for your lawyer to represent you. Eventually, some people can no longer afford to defend themselves.

Note: IANAL - these are only things I have witnessed personally.

Re: Developers’ side projects

#302

Post by nsb1 »

chrisan wrote: post #300
bonoboTP wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not American? It seems like legal costs in the US are sky high and people are constantly afraid of getting sued. I think it's somewhat better in mainland Europe, at least I don't see such anxiety over getting sued or so many threats of suing someone.

I am America. I am questioning why it is required to hire a lawyer for my example above

Depends on what you mean by "required". Is it required by law? No, probably not. If you actually want to win your case, however, you're going to need a lot of knowledge about the laws in question as well as court and legal proceedings to stand a chance, or your opposition's lawyers are likely to win the case on some sort of technicality because you didn't provide some document at the appropriate time or something like that.

Re: Developers’ side projects

#303

Post by hashhar »

dkersten wrote: post #288
hashhar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will be starting at the job the next summer (graduating next summer) and I too thought the same. If I didn't use the company's infrastructure or their internal technology or do the work while on company time (9 to 5) - then they should not be able to claim my work. TL;DR If you could not have built the product without being an employee of the company, it probably belongs to them. eg. Maybe you use Microsoft's lates…

Using an internal HoloLens prototype is the same as using their equipment or infrastructure. It belongs to them and you're using it.

That's exactly what I'm trying to say. If I use the publicly available devkit I expect that they have no claim.

If I use an internal prototype they have claim.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough before.

Re: Developers’ side projects

#304

Post by jbrazile »

Asooka wrote: post #273
jbrazile wrote: post #216

I am surprised nobody here has yet mentioned the real case of what happened to Evan Brown, the former president of the Dallas Ft Worth Unix Users Group who worked at a telephone switch company as a system administrator and had an idea for a generic code translator. Maybe the New York Times tells it best: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/08/business/an-idea-not-yet-b...

That and the e2 article both don't mention what actually happened in the end, does anyone know? Presumably Mr. Brown liquidated everything, ran out of money and died a beggar on the streets.

I wondered that myself having left DSC and moved away from DFW long before the story concluded.

Some details from 2000... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.dcom.telecom/Sq...

And a few more from 2004... http://www.law360.com/articles/1899/appeals-court-affirms-ex...

Re: Developers’ side projects

#305

Post by solatic »

Isn't there a relatively easy way to solve this problem?

As an employer, when you decide to hire someone to produce software for you, you assign them a private key tied to a certificate issued by the employer's certificate authority. The employer then has tooling which requires all commits to the employer's repositories to be signed with a certificate issued by the employer's certificate authority.

Then it's very simple: any code which has been signed by those certificates unambiguously belongs to the employer. Any code which has not been signed by those certificates does not belong to the employer.

Employers can demand that employees sign their work with these certificates in order to consider the work done, so employees who refuse to sign the work with those certificates risk giving up their salary for breach of contract. Employees are then free to sign whichever code they want on their free time, and assert ownership by virtue of it not being signed with their employer's certificate.

Re: Developers’ side projects

#306

Post by walshemj »

solatic wrote: post #305

Isn't there a relatively easy way to solve this problem? As an employer, when you decide to hire someone to produce software for you, you assign them a private key tied to a certificate issued by the employer's certificate authority. The employer then has tooling which requires all commits to the employer's repositories to be signed with a certificate issued by the employer's certificate authority. Then it's very sim…

What is to stop an employee cloning his work and signing it with his key

Re: Developers’ side projects

#307

Post by walshemj »

alxmng wrote: post #65

> Not related to your employer’s line of work. Um, wait. What’s the definition of related? [...] I don’t know. It’s a big enough ambiguity that you could drive a truck through it. No, it's not that ambiguous at all. The courts rarely side with the company, and only in cases where it's quite obvious the work was directly related. If your side project isn't directly related to the work you are doing, then you don't nee…

Depends if you can afford to enforce those rights

Re: Developers’ side projects

#308

Post by walshemj »

greggman wrote: post #160
gumby wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The courts rarely side with the company, and only in cases where it's quite obvious the work was directly related. The courts in California rarely side with the company, (so if you work on billing for Google and decide to do some machine learning on the side, even though Google does a lot of ML work no court would find in their favor -- though I doubt google would go after you anyway). But at the opposite end of th…

That doesn't fit my understanding of the law. Do you have references? The law has this concept of "duty of loyalty" which basically says by being an employee you are promising to do what's best for the company. As one example that means not competing against the company. In otherwords even if it's not related to your specific job you can not work on a product that competes with the company. https://en.m.wikipedia.org…

Your meant to be a "good servant" as this aspect of employment law descends from the masters and servant acts

Re: Developers’ side projects

#309

Post by KallDrexx »

nedwin wrote: post #202
KallDrexx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company I worked for (property appraisal company) got acquired by another company. They forced one of the higher up developers out. 6 months later that developer wrote an app dealing with lines at Disney and was making money on ad revenue. The company came after him claiming they owned it because he used skills and knowledge he gained while employed to write that app. We had a "everything you do at any time belongs…

What state was this in?

This was in Florida but the company that bought us was based in Minnnesota

Re: Developers’ side projects

#310

Post by walshemj »

paulrosenzweig wrote: post #10

I haven't heard about many disputed cases. I'd hope that if Google went around suing for possession of unrelated side projects, we'd hear about it. Maybe the possibility of being publicly shamed is a deterrent from pursing ownership.

Or they forced the person they where suing to sign a compromise agreement as part of the settlement
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