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As a thought experiment, for people who agree with the idea that a company 'owns' all of the thought-output of an employee: Why should that mean only the valuable IP, and not _all_ of the thought-output, including the unpleasant parts. If an employee commits a pre-meditated murder, should the company be liable, as a partial 'thought-owner'?
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For real. I am an indie game dev who recently released his first big game on Steam. Just a week or two ago I had a prospective company tell me that, in order to hire me, I would need to sell them the entirety of my personally-developed IP and dissolve my interest in my own company. Needless to say, I decided against that job.
You're not shameful enough to direct plug so I'll do it for you: http://soverance.com/ethereal/ Looks cool (fighting the "infected mushroom", ha).
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I agree--this is excellent and very tech-talent-friendly. As an example on the other side of the spectrum: I work for a very large Silicon Valley company that is well known (you've heard of them) for secrecy and obsessively guarding its IP. Here we can't[1] work on Open Source, work on potential start-up ideas, moonlight writing software for some extra cash, publish (either academically or releasing software online,…
Your employer, of course, is Google; I know this from my own tussles with Google's OSPO, which exists primarily to ensure that engineers don't have lives outside of Google.
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I agree--this is excellent and very tech-talent-friendly. As an example on the other side of the spectrum: I work for a very large Silicon Valley company that is well known (you've heard of them) for secrecy and obsessively guarding its IP. Here we can't[1] work on Open Source, work on potential start-up ideas, moonlight writing software for some extra cash, publish (either academically or releasing software online,…
Your employer, of course, is Google; I know this from my own tussles with Google's OSPO, which exists primarily to ensure that engineers don't have lives outside of Google.
I see no conclusive evidence in the parent comment that proves it's Google. I would've actually guessed Apple.
My understanding is that Google actually has a reasonable process for this, and that people have taken advantage of it to start or contribute to projects in a personal capacity.
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I agree--this is excellent and very tech-talent-friendly. As an example on the other side of the spectrum: I work for a very large Silicon Valley company that is well known (you've heard of them) for secrecy and obsessively guarding its IP. Here we can't[1] work on Open Source, work on potential start-up ideas, moonlight writing software for some extra cash, publish (either academically or releasing software online,…
Your employer, of course, is Google; I know this from my own tussles with Google's OSPO, which exists primarily to ensure that engineers don't have lives outside of Google.
I work for Microsoft and our policies are draconian. They of course make the standard claims of anything created on their hardware, using their software, or transmitted on their network. But to be exempt from their IP claim it also cannot be related to Microsoft business, or "anticipated business, research or development of Microsoft." Which of course is everything in the software world. It makes it particularly difficult since we're supposed to evangelize their stack and toolchain. But because of these policies I pay out of pocket for my own hardware, dev tools, as well as exclusively use GCP/AWS.
They do have a program they're very proud of where they let you use software you're given as an employee if you're developing an app for the windows store, but it's so vague as to be legally useless.
Take this for what you will.
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"It's worth $1B. Still want to buy it from me?"
I don't see a problem with this. If you put a price on that work, and they meet that price, seems like an equitable exchange.
If I had a company, I'd ask my employees to solve problems and write software that the company needs to sell products or service. I'd pay them to do that and give them the necessary tools to do their work. When they would deliver, we would roughly be even.
Now, if an employee is doodling some code of his own on the laptop given to him by my company, why would I care as long as he will do the things the company asked him to do? If he was doodling on his own laptop the company laptop would just be unused. A laptop doesn't effectively wear out because of personal use. In effect, when it comes to software engineering I would be paying for results.
For reference, in auto shops the mechanics can often use the company tools and facilities for personal evening/weekend projects or repairs. That's because the shop is closed anyway and the shop doesn't consider it a loss if their employee is fixing his own car, or his wife's car, or friend's car, during after hours.
I understand why companies require their employees to not do the same work for competing companies or for free. That would be like letting the employees cash in twice for the same solutions, and contributing to the competition.
But trying to own what employees might do with company computers on their spare time doesn't make sense, much less trying to own what employees might think on their spare time.
If such a rule is enforceable an employee who did get a profitable idea not related to his line of work would just keep his mouth shut, quietly resign and slow-start a company of his own or sell the idea to some other company. Nobody would be so stupid anyway as to invent something while being bound by a possessive employment contract, and then bring it up just to tranfer the IP to their employer for free. On the other hand, if the employer is reasonable and doesn't try to own the idea it's much less of a hassle to make a deal with them and continue with the current employer and letting both parties profit from the idea.
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Sad that having even minimal employee rights is some how seen as exceptional.
The real question is how expensive they are. The US has les protections but thus pays a lot more. Soft engineers moving from SF to europe get their income cut by more than 50%. In the end, more europeans move to the Us that the other way around, showing ultimately what the body prefers.
Most corporations I interviewed with have this policy, including Microsoft and some large banks. Otherwise it would be impossible to attract OS developers. Also the agreement[1] is not completely rosy, it has some strings attached. For example if you are working on CSS library, Github uses it and contracts you to make some patches, they might claim IP ownership over those patches. That is a mine field for OS project.…