11–20 of 93 posts
While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc. > In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is crea…
The framing matters: don't say "can I please do some charity work because it makes me feel good".
Say, "can I have your permission to get free rigorous review from experts in my field, and zero out all future maintenance costs for your company by contributing my fixes to the upstream open source project?"
Because that's really how it is. No employer of mine has ever said no to that. It is entirely in their interest for you to do this, you just have to help them see it.
While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc. > In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is crea…
I think it makes more sense for the commons to be built on mutuality and some kind of antibody against parasitic exploitation.
There is no “tragedy of the commons”. Private enterprise is the only tragedy.
While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc. > In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is crea…
This is so crazy. Companies benefit from OSS so they need to pay? Come on. Companies benefit from OSS because the core idea of most of these licenses is exactly this - everyone can benefit even without contributing back. Don’t like it? Think this is not fair? Don’t do OSS or pick a more restrictive license. If a company pays for your work time not work products (many contracts work like this) they have the full right…
While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc. > In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is crea…
The GitHub liberal IP agreement is a good example of being even more chill here.
While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc. > In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is crea…
While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc. > In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is crea…
The problems you are describing are not actually "problems in practice", as you say. They are theoretical problems.
In practice: You can just do stuff. There is no subroutine on your computer stopping the git push. In practice: Employers just write stuff in their employement contracts. They'll write everything they possibly can, to cover asses in every possible direction. If they're allowed to just write stuff, why aren't you allowed to just do stuff? Nothing matters. In practice: Roughly zero open source projects have had their IP challenged because of this technicality.
While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc. > In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is crea…
We always advise our employees to request an exception for it. We are pretty relaxed about it, but we don't give out a blanket exception