Earlier quoted context omitted.
The /s stands for sarcasm
⸮ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
This punctuation is very ironic.
IBM acquires Red Hat
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#952Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. I am pretty sure this is the standard practice at all large companies, at least in the US. Small companies may just not care too much, but even at a small company if your management notices you might have to choose between that and your day coding. I wish it was not like this, but to me this is at least somewhat justifiable. Much worse is the desire of…
How do enough people agree to those terms to make them plausible in the first place? That's like going to work at a restaurant and being required to stop working at a soup kitchen on the weekends. I would never agree to those terms and strike them out. That's ridiculous.
One way of looking at it is paying for mindshare. Sometimes companies want your brainpower only focussed on one programming problem. They might not want you at work, thinking about items in your side project.
Focus is a big deal. Doesn't make it right but it's the only business justification I've ever heard that actually seemed legit.
At the same time, there should be an expectation of compensation to give something like that up.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious. Anyone care to outline the legal ramifications of this action? What would happen if IBM tried to stop his side-project? 1. Would IBM be able to enforce the original contract as it was outlined when they sent it to him? Would he be liable to fraud or other similar charges (for instance if he altered the contract after IBM representative added their signature)? 2. Or would the altered contract stand up in…
IANAL, nut I would say 2. You can alter a contract proposition. It was up to IBM to check what was actually signed.
At least for real estate contracts in the US, both parties have to initial each of the alterations and amendments to the contract that typically come up during negotiations. I doubt a random line crossed out in a contract would hold any legal weight in court unless acknowledged by both parties.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#954Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely agree with you. I’ve been paid more or less to run GPFS over the last 15 years or so (finally free of it for the last few months), and while I hate it with a searing passion, a) it’s far better than the alternatives as long as you can afford it, and b) the people who lead and do the real work on the project are very, very bright. If they keep these people working on hard problems, they’ll do well. If the…
At the risk of topic drift, I'm curious where the problems are with being parallel and POSIX-compliant. I'm at a point where I think I need to consider a parallel file system and I don't have much experience with them, so I'm not aware of the issues.
Basically every time that POSIX makes a guarantee which is difficult to fulfill performantly in a distributed environment.
* Some directory operations require an atomic update to 2 different inodes, confounding sharding strategies and requiring some form of global synchronization.
* write() -- write syscall guarantees that when it returns, the filesystem will serve all future read() calls appropriately, with the contents of the write. This matches up poorly with big streaming writes -- in order to fulfill the spec, you need all these giant pockets of latency waiting for an ACK from the remote host, instead of just streaming it all and getting one ACK at the end.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#955When I worked for IBM (via acquisition), I wanted to fix bugs in Cygwin (owned by Red Hat). Red Hat does not accept patches unless you get permission from your current employer. I could not get anybody in IBM to sign Red Hat's permission slip. Nobody would sign because it's all risk, no reward from IBM's point of view.
Couldn't you just submit patches under a pseudonym?
Linux kernel, as an example, expressly rejects this.
Source: multiple discussion with GKH.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#956Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am currently working for IBM and I'm tied. I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. What I have in contract is - if you want to open a company, you need IBM's permission first. And it's just frustrating as they try to block it for as long as possibe even if you're not doing IT in your private little business.
> I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. I am pretty sure this is the standard practice at all large companies, at least in the US. Small companies may just not care too much, but even at a small company if your management notices you might have to choose between that and your day coding. I wish it was not like this, but to me this is at least somewhat justifiable. Much worse is the desire of…
I've only worked at one large company (EA), but they were ok with side businesses as long as it wasn't competing with their core business of gaming. IIRC you could even promote it internally. This was about 9 years ago.
For game related things you could list them as existing inventions when joining. So you can carve out exceptions. Which is common with game companies.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#957Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an IBMer and the current rule is you can work on OS projects in your own time as long as it isn't to the detriment of IBM's projects.
As IBMer you should know there are a plurality of local IBM all over the world, each with local laws and regulations to abide. In Italy all work produced off hours as subordinate is intellectual property of the employer by default unless you sign off a release form for each of them. In Ireland at least they don't want you to touch third party open source code without license vetting because it could inspire you subco…
These terms would be illegal in the Netherlands as the company cannot infringe on personal time.
> In Italy all work produced off hours as subordinate is intellectual property of the employer by default unless you sign off a release form for each of them.
I'm pretty sure that will not hold up in court if you go high enough (e.g. European) as it would impede self determination.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#958I went to IBM(India) interview sometime in 2011, after leaving GlusterFS (Red Hat). Interview went well, during final call with management. I was asked to stop working on Open Source during weekends or off-hours even though the IBM project and my Open Source work has nothing in common. I said, "I thought, IBM support Open Source right?" his response, "Yes, but that's another team" I decided to call-off the interview…
People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it.
I've routinely done this with every contract I've ever signed. Nothing gets signed without legal scrutiny on my part and it never will; and I've quite literally never had a potential client or employer balk at this.
All of them have agreed that my amendments have been quite reasonable - and that includes scrubbing through any sections that prevent me from working for other clients or writing my own projects, commercial or otherwise.
Ensuring a contract is fair and equitable is part of doing business. There is nothing wrong with this. When you work for a company, you are still an autonomous person with your own agency. Any company that seeks to deny that agency don't deserve your employ.
Any reasonable and honourable company expects you to review contracts and amend them. You shouldn't feel bad about doing this. Nor should you feel coerced by the fact that they have given you a one sided contract. Make it equitable.
I don't care if you're IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or God almighty, himself. If you choose to attempt to quell my agency, our relationship is done. I will not be denied my agency and neither should anyone else.
Those companies that over-reach in a bid to control their employees are unscrupulous. This is the same kind of toxic behaviour that people seek to avoid in their relationships, yet somehow they're quite willing to live their life working in relationships like this... I don't understand the double standard.
I've heard soooooo many people say that "contracts are just standard paper and if I rock the boat I won't get the job."
Don't be bullied into signing a contract because you feel like you don't have any other option.
Contracts are not "standard paper," they are legally binding documents that seek to limit your behaviour. Don't let any employer reach outside their jurisdiction and into your personal life. Ever.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#959When I worked for IBM (via acquisition), I wanted to fix bugs in Cygwin (owned by Red Hat). Red Hat does not accept patches unless you get permission from your current employer. I could not get anybody in IBM to sign Red Hat's permission slip. Nobody would sign because it's all risk, no reward from IBM's point of view.
I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity (like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being completely outside of my work at the University and s…
This is also a major obstacle towards open science, and one that the open science community seems generally unaware of. Every day there seems to be another journal article extolling the virtues of data-sharing and imploring other researchers to share, but very few folks seem to treat the elephant in the room, which is that universities have no motivation to allow their researchers to release data for free and potentially relinquish valuable IP.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#960Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity (like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being completely outside of my work at the University and s…
Come to Sweden then :) As a researcher you explicitly own the rights to any foreground, i.e. results, as stated by law — the so called teacher’s excemption.
Europe also more generally has much higher salaries for postdocs and grad students from what I've seen floating around listservs.