Ask HN: Can I fork my open-source project I created under an employer?

In many US states, provisions in any contract forbidding you to take certain other jobs are entirely unenforceable. In some states it is illegal even to ask you to sign such a contract (although many employers do anyway), but in most others where they are unenforceable, employers can still ask and hope you are fooled.

There are probably whole countries that forbid these contract provisions, or forbid enforcing them.

Don't assume that any particular right you signed away to get a job is really gone. Ask a local lawyer. Expect to be surprised. In many cases, even when there is no specific law, case law has interpreted such clauses very restrictively, making them de facto unenforceable for, e.g., anybody below company officer level.

If you have signed non-compete clauses in the employment contract, then you may be prevented, for the specified period, from contributing ideas related to your work to any project whatsoever anywhere, open source or proprietary. That has nothing to do with the particulars of that project.

Just because the employers approved some code to be released under the MIT, which allows for unfettered competition using the ideas embodied in that code, doesn't mean they approve the leakage of other ideas (either into that code, or any other code).

Nothing in the MIT license itself prevents you from forking the project; from that perspective, it's no different from any other individual's or organization's MIT-licensed program. It's all about what you are allowed to do according to the entirely separate contract with the employer.

It doesn’t matter if the employee acted in good faith. The former employer can still lawyer up and create a problem. And there is a reasonable probability that no one with executive authority signed off on the code repository simply because of the way software development happens and the standards In industry.

To put it another way, the legality matters less than the relationship. A lawyer can communicate with the former employer in a way that mitigates potential problems. Or say it is unlikely to be a problem.

> Am I legally allowed to fork the project and use it commercially after leaving said employer?

Yes, but follow these limitations:

* Always keep your fork at least as open and free as the original license. The more restrictive the open source license you choose for your fork the less willing a business entity will want to entangle themselves with it. That is why I prefer these licenses for my personal projects: AGPLv3 and CC0.

* Never violate the terms of the original license.

* Don’t compete with your employer.

Everyone in the thread is overly paranoid. IANAL but have delt with this stuff enough to know that in general you’re fine if California law applies and it’s an MIT license - don’t violate the MIT license though. None of the non compete clauses are enforceable here and you can compete with your employer.

What you can’t likely do is induce previous colleges to quit the company and join your new company for whatever the term is that the contract says you can’t. Usually a year.

When you “fork” it don’t just hit the fork button if you are real concerned. Make sure you have your own copy of the thing and re push it.

They can sue you if they feel like it no matter what the contract says or CA law but they will probably lose on the terms you mentioned in CA. So unless you are high up and going to a direct competitor of say amazon hypothetically, you probably have nothing to worry about.

And yeah, sure, have an attorney read your contract if you really want. It’s 300-400 bucks well spent because then you have an attorney you have worked with when something real hairy comes up.