281–290 of 339 posts
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Not the only way. California and Washington have legal protections for employees. IP you create outside working hours, on your own hardware, and wholly unrelated to your job, is your own.
The question becomes what is wholly unrelated. If I'm hired to program, some might argue that any code I write is not wholly unrelated to my work.
https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2011/lab/division-3/...
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Ohh yes.. These contracts are always maximalist. That's why I never touch areas where my company can even remotely claim involvement. But these are extremely important points that must be always keep in mind by everyone who wants to contribute in open-source.
What you describe in your original comment is that you write code at night with the intent of it being used by your company the next morning. I can't see how that doesn't "relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business".
1) Let's us say my company wants me to create a full stack dashboard that helps you visualise the inventory. I can just create a corona dashboard and then adjust the db tables and models in the office whereas keeping my original idea still free.
2) I create a library to easily log my programs with proper gears suited to my needs.
3) I write a DB script that helps me do active passive backup easily.
4) I write an FPGA library with vLL but enforcing an encryption. I provide a use case for astronomy (whereas my company is for retail, let us say)
My point is there's always a way out.
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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…
> except for those inventions that either: (1) relate at the time ... to the employer’s business 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?
From things I have read, yes, this exception is that broad. BUT then I did some more reading and happened upon this article which seems to say otherwise? https://www.natlawreview.com/article/employment-law-and-pate...
The key thing being California Business and Professions Code § 16600 which seems to be on the side of the employees. Can anyone more familiar with this stuff confirm my understanding?
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I also worked for a company with an objectionable IP clause, and because of their general state of disorganisation I didn't actually receive a copy of the contract until after I had been working there for a few weeks. While discussing my options with friends and colleagues, I was given the ridiculous advice that I was already bound by the contract just by showing up and that signing it wouldn't make a difference. For…
> While discussing my options with friends and colleagues, I was given the ridiculous advice that I was already bound by the contract just by showing up and that signing it wouldn't make a difference. "Then what's the point of me signing it? Are you going to fire me because of something which makes no difference?"
Under this theory, I may have been entitled to any benefits that were mentioned during the interview and salary negotiation process, but they might be difficult for me to enforce. For example, if the company had refused to grant those mentioned benefits, as a form of constructive dismissal, I might have had a hard time proving during an employment tribunal which benefits were informally agreed (and were conditions upon which I had accepted their job offer).
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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.
The company would have to remove all contributions of external developers though. If the project was not licensed under the GPL, but external contributors did contribute to the project under the GPL, then it seems to me that either the company has to release the project under the GPL, or remove all the third-party contributions and any code that might be derived from those contributions (since it would be a derived w…
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Not the only way. California and Washington have legal protections for employees. IP you create outside working hours, on your own hardware, and wholly unrelated to your job, is your own.
The question becomes what is wholly unrelated. If I'm hired to program, some might argue that any code I write is not wholly unrelated to my work.
The clause ought to be that your off-hours, personal work must not have a direct conflict of interest with your job.
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> but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty 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.
> 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. That is how Open Source is supposed to work , I don't understand why everyone is thinking that this is some kind of huge discovery. Since both the MVICore and MVIKotlin repos are Apache 2.0, Badoo could simply pull in any improvements from MVIKotlin in if they wanted. They cou…
i dont know if you can claim this - OSS is not supposed to be unsanctioned derivative works of commercial software that is private. The company _could_ make it OSS, but an employee cannot, since they do not actually own the rights to make this decision.
Perhaps Bumble was a bit heavy handed, but from the point of view of the law, they are acting within their rights to demand ownership transfer, or removal etc.
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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.
The company would have to remove all contributions of external developers though. If the project was not licensed under the GPL, but external contributors did contribute to the project under the GPL, then it seems to me that either the company has to release the project under the GPL, or remove all the third-party contributions and any code that might be derived from those contributions (since it would be a derived w…
Thus, everything you do will be a derivative work of what I started. If your company tries to take it, I can come in and cause problems for them.
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The company would have to remove all contributions of external developers though. If the project was not licensed under the GPL, but external contributors did contribute to the project under the GPL, then it seems to me that either the company has to release the project under the GPL, or remove all the third-party contributions and any code that might be derived from those contributions (since it would be a derived w…
This makes me think, you could have a friend develop a MVP which you use as a starting point for your project. For example, if you want to create a game, I could write a simple event loop and render a couple triangles on the screen, then give this to you as an example, and with an agreement that you can build upon it. Thus, everything you do will be a derivative work of what I started. If your company tries to take i…
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To add an anecdote: on my last job search I got offers from two different but very similar companies (both around ~200 people). I got one first, read through the contract, saw the standard clause about owning your whole life. I told them it was a deal-breaker if we couldn't get it changed. I got the standard response "oh we never act on that, lots of people here have side-projects", etc. I told them if that was the p…
Thank you for sharing those anecdotes. Holding out seems like the right thing to do, game theory wise. Plus, it just feels right to me. P.S. I really enjoyed your website. I'm a type 1 and 3 mix myself :)