321–330 of 411 posts
This is why programmers need unions! Or a guild. Or something! That employers totally dictate everything in a field that is in such high demand is absolutely unacceptable.
Briefly: consult a lawyer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably, in most systems, the loser pays all (legal) costs for both sides at least.
Not in the US
As I usually say re the US "How is THIS not an issue in the election?"
If I was reasonably sure I had the law on my side I'd dare go to court against an entity of any size, relying on the convention that the loser pays, and the rulings are nearly always in favor of an employee.
> 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…
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…
Don't work for companies that are dicks. If there's crap about them wanting to own you or your thoughts, don't sign it and get a different job elsewhere.
Remember when little kids would die in factories doing dangerous jobs? No? Me neither. Know why? Because at some point people had enough, went on strike, attitudes and laws changed. If you live in an area where your employer can make your life miserable for no apparent reason, or where your employer can own you outside of work, then you need to help put a stop to that madness.
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…
> Regardless of whether you are legally right, a larger company could sue you for the sake of suing, and make your life very miserable A company with resources could sue you for a number of bogus reasons if they wanted to be dicks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not right. The owner of the copyright is the only entity that can decide the license of the code.
That's an assumption. Following that assumption, you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale. What the employment contract does is own the contribution precisely because it doesn't make any sense to ask permission everytime an employee writes anything in his own time.
You're saying it's "an assumption" that only the copyright holder can dictate the license? That's not an assumption. That's the whole point of copyright. The owner of the copyright determines the terms under which others can use the copyright.
Consider this: every open source project that has wanted to relicense but did not explicitly require a copyright assignment, had to talk to every single contributor to get their permission to relicense.
> Following that assumption, you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale.
This gets into not what is legal but what is reasonable and sensible.
If you write 20 lines of code using your work computer on work time and don't have prior authorization to give that code to an open source project, you technically have to get your employer's permission. Realistically, few employers would frown upon that.
There are still companies out there that are not open source friendly. If you work for one of those, you'll find that you actually do need to get permission before contributing code.
I should note that I am taking the US perspective on this. Different countries have different views of copyright, and as noted in the original post different US states have different views on employment contracts.
IANAL, but I have managed and worked closely with some reasonably large open source projects and spent more than my fair share looking into licensing terms.
She'll point out any clauses (not just IP clauses) designed or phrased in such a way as to be unfair in the employer's favor, and will suggest alternative language that protects both them and me.
I have yet to encounter an employer who wouldn't accept a few small changes to an overly broad IP clause, and print and sign a fresh copy of the contract with the changes incorporated.
My current employer took very little convincing to accept the idea that they only wanted the IP created for them, not all IP created during the period of my employment.
After all, as I pointed out, they have no more interest in owning the code or design of my block association's website than I have in giving it to them. And it's unreasonable to expect me to cease to be its maintainer just because of a job switch from a fashion startup to an entertainment industry startup. As long as I don't work on it during work hours or using a work computer/internet/etc, why should they care what I do with my evenings and weekends?
So they accepted a modification. Of course, we might have trouble if I tried to compete with them in some way. But even if in my spare time I create a tool or library that eventually ends up being useful in building their own software, I retain the IP to that library. I might not get away with licensing something like that to them for a fee (good faith cuts both ways), but if it's already BSD licensed anyway, they can add it as a dependency and everyone's happy.
And if I want to be paid for contract work for an unrelated startup on weekends, well, that wasn't the use case I used to convince them. But the contract modifications give me the right to do so without turning the IP over to them. And again, if it's not competing, why should they care?
TLDR: Read and understand contracts before you sign them. Get help understanding if you need it. Don't sign something you don't want to be held to the letter of. Sometimes employers are flexible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not in the US
That gives a larger/richer entity the power to use litigation as threat/bullying only by having deeper pockets. It means there is a legal advantage of having more money. That's insane. As I usually say re the US "How is THIS not an issue in the election?" If I was reasonably sure I had the law on my side I'd dare go to court against an entity of any size, relying on the convention that the loser pays, and the rulings…
What would people think of a website that collates instances of companies taking legal action against employees regarding side projects and then ranks them with respect to 'side-project' friendliness? Would a bad rating for a company impact your decision to take a job there? Also, it would be cool if there was some widely available standard 'developer friendly' contract (or even addendum to a contract) that software…
I'm very interested in this because it's a great first step towards politically organizing. PM my username on Reddit if youre interested in collaborating.