21–30 of 93 posts
If you can do 1000x surely most projects are now essentially “complete” and bug free.
I don’t get this contradiction. Something is wrong.
This is an ethical disgrace and everyone involved should be ashamed.
In all the juridictions I have worked in, the code I ship during my work hours is owned by my employer, not me. I simply just can't decide on my own to contribute during my work hours. I need a formal agreement to work on open source code, and every single time I asked for it it took so much time (months) to run through legal department that I simply gave up or another contributor had shipped a PR in the meantime so I just gave up asking.
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. 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 p…
> "and make sure you own the open source IP you ship. " In all the juridictions I have worked in, the code I ship during my work hours is owned by my employer, not me. I simply just can't decide on my own to contribute during my work hours. I need a formal agreement to work on open source code, and every single time I asked for it it took so much time (months) to run through legal department that I simply gave up or…
It's never been a problem, and I feel is perfectly reasonable in the grand scheme of things.
My employers have generally been fine giving me blanket permission to contribute to specific open source projects. 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?…
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. 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 p…
this is not just about you and your risk, but also about the risk for the project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. 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 p…
You might be comfortable taking that risk yourself, but if you misrepresent your FOSS contributions as your own copyright you impose that risk on third parties. Tricking people into infringing your employer's copyright is asshole behavior.
I'd be surprised if there was any actual burden on the upstream maintainer to care whether I was on my lunch break or whether I was on the clock when I made the fix.
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…