Does anyone know what is the rational for Bumble to do this?
It will be something that we might never know
Maybe juste to spite a leaving employee.
Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
41–50 of 339 posts
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#42Here in Russia Rambler tried to do the same with nginx, and they failed to achieve their goals. I don't know, it creates nothing but bad publicity without giving anything in return considering they won't maintain it anyway if the core devs leave (and nothing stops them from forking and creating their commercial solution right now). The image of Rambler before: "Igor Sysoev created nginx while working at Rambler" (pos…
The story gets more interesting if you consider that Bumble is also developing two libraries under their official name, badoo/MVICore and badoo/RIBs, which are conceptually the same as MVIKotlin and Decompose respectively.
What do you do, if a framework/library is effectively a rewrite of something developed by another team at the same company, but also released officially under the brand of same company?
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds lile really greay areas though. Can an employer claim the work of something done outside of work (as in paid) hours? If the employer didn't retribute this time in the first place, can it be considered as being in the "course of the employment"? This seems that if this kind of super generic statement will always go in the way of the employer, it would be a giant loophole to go any regulation on working hou…
There might also be a clause in a salaried employee's contract that specifically requires them to notify the employer of any other work they are doing and get permission, precisely because otherwise the employer could end up in trouble under working time rules through no fault of their own. As I understand it, this area can get very tricky because you have several general positions in law here that might be in confli…
It's definitely something really complex. My contract does have a clause requiring me to notify them about side activities.
It's a small company and, from what I gathered when I discussed the contract with the founder back then, a lawyer advised him to add this clause to protect the company indeed.
My advise to any company that is thinking to do the same thing that this one did to this developer, if you're interested by the open source projects of one of your employee, sponsor it, give time to your employee to contribute in his/her working hours for example. You'll have a much better outcome.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#44Just imagine you hiring someone just to play with his Ruby pet projects all day long...
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#45I've asked this before and never got a straight answer, but I'll ask again: what exact clauses do I need to modify in the employment contract, and what exactly must they say, in order to avoid this sort of situation? (relevant to UK employment that is). If you've solved this for yourself, please tell us all how and what it's written in yours so we can do the same. Here is a link to what my previous employment contrac…
Talk to a work contract specialized lawyer. Even apart from this issue, there might be other issues in the contract, so why not alway talk to one before signing.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#46Here in Russia Rambler tried to do the same with nginx, and they failed to achieve their goals. I don't know, it creates nothing but bad publicity without giving anything in return considering they won't maintain it anyway if the core devs leave (and nothing stops them from forking and creating their commercial solution right now). The image of Rambler before: "Igor Sysoev created nginx while working at Rambler" (pos…
If the company owns it, the the (gpl or whatever) licensing was not legal, so the core devs cannot 'fork it', since that would be illegal. They can rewrite the project from scratch though.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#47Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#48Assuming for the moment that their claim is legally sound, what are the practical implications? The code is already published under an open-source license, with multiple other contributors to which they don't have an employment relationship... Ownership would allow them to relicense the employees original contributions, but they'd still need to negotiate with or replace all code by other contributors, and they can't…
They want the official repo.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#49I've asked this before and never got a straight answer, but I'll ask again: what exact clauses do I need to modify in the employment contract, and what exactly must they say, in order to avoid this sort of situation? (relevant to UK employment that is). If you've solved this for yourself, please tell us all how and what it's written in yours so we can do the same. Here is a link to what my previous employment contrac…
Usually the clause where they claim ownership needs to have the phrase "Related to the business", or "During work hours with company equipment". If it tries to claim all IP during the course of the employment, redline it and hand it back
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#50I've asked this before and never got a straight answer, but I'll ask again: what exact clauses do I need to modify in the employment contract, and what exactly must they say, in order to avoid this sort of situation? (relevant to UK employment that is). If you've solved this for yourself, please tell us all how and what it's written in yours so we can do the same. Here is a link to what my previous employment contrac…
Usually the clause where they claim ownership needs to have the phrase "Related to the business", or "During work hours with company equipment". If it tries to claim all IP during the course of the employment, redline it and hand it back
Search for the words "or otherwise" in that block of text. I've had multiple discussions with the legal department at that employer and they refused to remove those words from the text.
So it's not enough to just have those phrases in there (as they already are)...
13.4 (c) hereby assign to us by way of future assignment with full title guarantee (insofar as title to them does not automatically vest in $COMPANY as a consequence of your Employment subject to clauses 39-43 of the Patents Act 1977) all copyright arising in any original material (including source code and object code for software) and all other Intellectual Property Rights produced by you in the course of your Employment, whether during our normal hours of business or otherwise, or at the premises or using our facilities or otherwise, for the whole term of such copyright including any extensions or renewals thereof and including the right to sue for damages and other remedies for any infringements of the copyrights; and