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GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

qz.com

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Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

#12

Post by badminton1 »

Pet projects are not necessarily good for a company:

1) Code is not necessarily an asset, it is also a liability: needs to be maintained, tested, documented, etc. This has a non-trivial cost.

2) Engineer salaries are usually more expensive than a license.

3) Experience working using internal frameworks/libraries/etc can be harder to trade in the marketplace, especially if you are not the author.

4) It is hard to keep up feature parity with commercial/open source alternatives.

5) Internal projects do not necessarily lead to more employee satisfaction. They can be usually lacking around user experience and can be frustrating to use.

6) Some internal projects have purely political motivations, like self-perpetuating the authors in the company.

Finally, if you absolutely require to start an internal project, but it does not provide a competitive advantage: open source it.

Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

#14

Post by misterhtmlcss »

lostboys67 wrote: post #10
uniclaude wrote: post #8

People keep complaining about how hard and expensive it is to attract top talent. This kind of measure is exactly how you do it. Provide an environment where employees feel trusted and empowered, pay market rate, screen properly instead of having applicants jump through hoops, and you won't have much trouble hiring. Kudos to github for this, I'm impressed!

Sad that having even minimal employee rights is some how seen as exceptional.

@lostboys totally agree, but thankful someone is at least offering me more than serf rights

Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

#15

Post by bkovacev »

Big step in the right direction. I also believe this will have huge impact on the morale as well. If you offer enough courtesy to your employees you'll receive a lot more in return. Personally, I believe this can boost productivity in a different way, because if the employee is challenged with a different set of problems other than the "same ol' " during the work time, the experience can be directly applied to the possible future employer's problems.

Granted, this can have downsides too.

Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

#17

Post by alistproducer2 »

For anyone interested in the Alcatel horror story mentioned in the article, it's even worse than you thought:

Therefore his thoughts, which were characterised as “invention” in the decision, should be disclosed to Alcatel. The judge also ordered Brown to pay Alcatel’s legal fees, which exceeded $330,000.[1]

1: https://www.law360.com/ip/articles/1899/appeals-court-affirm...

Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

#18

Post by camoby »

I always try to negotiate this. Since I always bring value, effort and ideas from personal time and resources in to the company, for free.

If they don't want to do that, then write down a big list of every idea and project you've been working on to date, including any domains you own and projects within them, and make sure they can't touch any of the IP you've already created.

Also: Be friendly about it.

Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources

#20

Post by ifdefdebug »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #17

For anyone interested in the Alcatel horror story mentioned in the article, it's even worse than you thought: Therefore his thoughts, which were characterised as “invention” in the decision, should be disclosed to Alcatel. The judge also ordered Brown to pay Alcatel’s legal fees, which exceeded $330,000.[1] 1: https://www.law360.com/ip/articles/1899/appeals-court-affirm...

Sometimes it feels like Kafka's The Trial is where the US court system takes most of it's inspiration from...
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