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Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

ossresistance.com

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Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#51

Post by vinckr »

em-bee wrote: post #28
827a wrote: post #19

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…

when you commit code to a project you are warranting that you have the legal right to do so. the bigger projects will not even accept your contribution done at work without an explicit permission from your employer. this is not just about you and your risk, but also about the risk for the project.

in most cases you dont need explicit permission but you need to sign a CLA (Individual Contributor License Agreement) - which kind of includes permission

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#52

Post by tombert »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #12

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?…

I'm a little sad that I got laid off from a previous job for a variety of reasons, but one big one was that there were discussions of letting me open source some very big changes I had made to the Kafka Streams library.

I rewrote a lot of stuff while keeping the API mostly compatible, focusing on emphasizing non-blocking IO with backpressure semantics available if necessary. It was really cool and enabled a lot of interesting stuff involving the state store and mixing+matching blocking and non-blocking IO in a way that was still relatively performant. I think it was really neat and it's one of the projects I am most proud of because I was able to squeeze out performance in a lot of places that were non-obvious.

I was pushing to allow us to release it to Github and/or make a PR to the upstream Kafka Streams project, but sadly they did layoffs before that was completed and afterwards there was really no "champion" to do that, so it's stuck in proprietary land.

I might still do it from scratch and FOSS it, it's been long enough to where I think I wouldn't get in trouble if I rewrote it and released it (there weren't any patents or anything attached to it), and there are a few things I'd like to change anyway (like getting rid of the dependency of Vert.x). Maybe if I ever get a week off I'll do that.

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#54

Post by vinckr »

hkolk wrote: post #20
zokier wrote: post #5

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…

In the Netherlands the law is pretty straigtforward that this is a bad idea: > The "Nature of Employment" Rule: If you are hired as a software developer, almost any software you create (even in your own time) can be claimed by your employer. 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

Has that law ever been enforced ? (e.g. taking away a FOSS or other project that someone wrote in their own time)

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#55

Post by orthogonal_cube »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #12

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?…

I miss working at a place which allowed this.

Some employers get tangled up in just the legal review process.

Once I asked permission to submit a patch to a project and it had quite an interesting email trail. It came down to a single question: if the patch was written during hours billed to a customer for the purpose of fixing a bug in a deliverable product, and the library being patched had to be recompiled and delivered with the source code, and the contract states that all work and intellectual property associated to the product would be transferred to the customer, do we have authority to release the patch in the public domain?

Legal didn’t want to answer it.

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#56

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

zokier wrote: post #5

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 the post is suggesting to follow the path of least resistance. Work on company time, try not to make many waves. If you are caught ask for forgiveness. The easy path for the company is to forgive you. If they get lawyers involved, it can get very expensive and it could become a PR nightmare for them.

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#57

Post by somewhatgoated »

beastman82 wrote: post #38
keybored wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate?

Read "Not everyone will approve of this" section. You are not free to make any of these decisions on behalf of your employer.

Won’t somebody think of the companies and their shareholders!!1

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#58

Post by sheepscreek »

tombert wrote: post #52
jcalvinowens wrote: post #12

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?…

I'm a little sad that I got laid off from a previous job for a variety of reasons, but one big one was that there were discussions of letting me open source some very big changes I had made to the Kafka Streams library. I rewrote a lot of stuff while keeping the API mostly compatible, focusing on emphasizing non-blocking IO with backpressure semantics available if necessary. It was really cool and enabled a lot of in…

Fixing a bug in something open-source should be acceptable to most employers. However, if new functionality is being added, then it becomes an entirely different conversation.

I think it is good that you were taking the legal + compliance sign-offs before pursuing it.

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#59

Post by cindyllm »

keybored wrote: post #14

Don’t give shit away for free if you expect something in return, even something altruistic like for the recipients to be nice to the gift and keep it in good shape. 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.

[dead]

Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

#60

Post by beastman82 »

somewhatgoated wrote: post #57
beastman82 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read "Not everyone will approve of this" section. You are not free to make any of these decisions on behalf of your employer.

Won’t somebody think of the companies and their shareholders!!1

*and their employees, who depend on the company to be healthy as a central economic tenet of their employment. This really isn't debatable
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