131–140 of 339 posts
Bumble gave him a cake for five years service recently, so the company can’t be that bad really. https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1446071099989663745?s=... Surely we can overlook the whole “give us your damn open source personal projects copyright grab or you’ll be chewing on big legal problems buddy” thing given the companies generosity with cake? The cake shows that Bumble really are good people. Reminds me of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search for 'california assignment of inventions' as well as 'california assignment of inventions template'. The first hit for the latter is currently https://launchtothrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Thrive... which has a great exhibit B you can attach. Reword it to reference the CA statute but to be clear that it shall apply to you regardless of residence in CA.
You mean this? California Labor Code Section 2870 provides as follows: Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret informat…
So if the domain of your side project has nothing to do with what you're actively involved in at work, but your employer is involved in or has a business interest in that domain, the employer can claim ownership? Which for many large companies (especially e.g. Google) is a lot of domains?
If we're talking about hobby projects, that's different, but it seems from this tweet that this is something that could have been written internally as part of someone's job and never open-sourced, right?
Many years ago I had a job offer at Badoo in the UK. After many rounds of going back-and-forth with the contract, me trying to better understand certain clauses, them going back to the lawyers, etc. I told them I'd be happy to sign if they removed the caluses that stated pretty much anything I created on or off hours belonged to them. They went back to the lawyers and came back to me saying that this is not the first…
My experience from the other side of the fence is that this is pretty standard, i.e. nobody would really bother with changing the standard contract for one potential employee unless they were perceived as a crucial asset. The people who do the hiring, the ones who make the decisions and the ones who will work with you later - these are very different groups of people, with some (very temporary) overlap. The hiring on…
A note to Bumble, this makes me not want to work for you or anyone who is currently in a related leadership position at Bumble (ie: eng leadership, etc.). Given the lack of supply in engineering the bad publicity is going to cost you more than any miniscule gain. edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.
Does anyone know what is the rational for Bumble to do this?
The rationale is that what other people here are saying - that Bumble (Badoo) should have paid them on company time to contribute to open-source - was already happening. Bumble owns under the Badoo repository two projects, called badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs. These libraries are developed on company time by employees, as open-source. If you check MVIKotlin and Decompose, you'll see that they're conceptually equivale…
When building a side project I use one of the names from my prior inventions list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is great, Thank You! "which relate to, or are reasonably capable of being used in, the business of the Company or any Group Company" sounds like a good phrasing to me, especially the "business" part of it as I interpret it to be the company simply wanting you to not build a competing product while employed there (a fair thing to have in a contract). For reference, this is what my last contract had: https://news.…
Please be really careful about that kind of phrasing. If you work for a large organisation, it might be doing work on almost anything somewhere in the org and you might not even know that work exists. And yet now if your own project that is entirely unrelated to your own role and work for the employer can be linked to that other work you didn't even know about, your employer owns everything.
Personally, at the same time as signing the employment contract, I would create a list of projects I develop/contribute to outside of work with a description and links, and have them sign an acknowledgement these don't interfere with their "business" (and if they refuse to sign simply resign on the spot the same second), whether or not they use them already for business purposes or not, and an obligation for them to notify me if they ever start using one of my projects internally in the future.
Also, for open source projects I contribute too that the company uses I'd have a separate paper stating my role in them, and both of our expectation for contributions that are made during/outside of hours, again signed by both parties.
For FOSS projects that I own that the company wants to use, I'll have them clearly define my scope in them during employment, have them assign copyright ownership to me for any contribution they want upstreamed, and have every commit with their hashes reviewed and approved by a lead/manager.
But as far as I'm concerned, there is no point in doing any of this if the employment contract states they own all my IP, since the documents would contradict one another. That's why cleaning up the mess in the employment contract is such a big deal for me.
A note to Bumble, this makes me not want to work for you or anyone who is currently in a related leadership position at Bumble (ie: eng leadership, etc.). Given the lack of supply in engineering the bad publicity is going to cost you more than any miniscule gain. edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.
After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. It says so in the README.md. They were also written while the author was employed by Badoo/Bumble.
I don't think this is as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments would suggest.
I worked for a company once that had this sort of "we own everything" IP clause. They tried to get me to sign it after I had already started. I crossed out that part, initialed the change, and sent it back unsigned. Ended up going back and forth a few times, and then it got dropped behind a desk or something and we all forgot about it. Not surprisingly, I suppose, that company turned out to be a bit of a mess for oth…
To clarify: Bumble doesn't appear to be going after everything this developer produced while working for them.
They're claiming ownership of only two specific repos, both of which even mention that they were "inspired by" Badoo/Bumble open-source projects. These two repos were developed while the developer was working for Badoo/Bumble and I assume are directly related to the type of work the developer was doing for hire.
Obviously we don't have all the details, but from what I'm seeing it seems Badoo/Bumble may actually have a strong case for these repos being their property, even without weird IP assignment clauses.
If either tool was used or contributed to while developing the Bumble app, it's basically no question that they have rights to it. On the other hand, if the author somehow never, ever used them as part of his dayjob and never, ever worked on them as part of his work for Bumble, the claims would be questionable.