Does anyone know any good alternatives to this?
An apology to open source
131–140 of 259 posts
Re: An apology to open source
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obfuscation is more than enough to protect the code. You need only to make the cost of ripping it off greater than or equal to the cost of creating it. IP is so much more than the code. It's the concepts, the graphics, everything.
I don't think so at all,even without trying to reverse it you can inspect the DOM and debug the event flow etc. I think "construction is more difficult than verification" is a good adage for engineering. JS/CSS is transmitted in the clear and it should move towards open source, plus it's not hugely valuable. Now, if this guy was doing projects at work to do charting and then he decides to open source that on his own?…
I wasn't advocating for the company to use obfuscation. It's largely irrelevant in this regard. I was replying to the comment above mine which was left by someone who seems to think that obfuscated code is somehow less secure than compiled code.
I agree -- if I was the boss in this situation the open source thing would be allowed to continue.
Re: An apology to open source
#133Re: An apology to open source
#134An open note to Nick's Employers - 1) If you are a technology company, this is Harakiri ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku ). You are alienating every developer who is worth her salt. If you have a recruiting arm, and they are trying to recruit, god be with them. Ofcourse, you think people will never come to know, but this has the potential to be a good story and press will pick it up. I will not be surprised if…
They may be a very good employer. This may have been uncomfortably close to his closed-source day-job. Without details we don't know. And eventually everyone moves on. Company loyalty is dead.
Loyalty is reciprocal. I've never understood why companies expect complete loyalty while simultaneously showing none in return. I also think that it's very unlikely they are 'good employers'. They may pay well, but that's a totally different thing to being a good employer.
Re: An apology to open source
#135NVD3, a d3.js reusable chart library, was taken down by Novus several months ago. At first they asked all the GitHub forks to close down. Eventually, after an outcry on the d3-js Google Group, Hacker News, and other forums, Novus relented and re-released the library with this statement: http://nvd3.org/statement.html
Yes, this is EXACTLY the response that we are looking for.
Not that the company is necessarily in the wrong to ask that the open source code be taken down, but that the community should persuade that company that it is in their interest to keep the code available. (For reputational reasons AS WELL AS all the other benefits of supporting open source.)
Re: An apology to open source
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was he also asked by his employer to take down his "final year university project" that this was supposed to be? That sounds a little bit incongruous to me. Or was the "final year university project" also somehow related to his job output preceding in the creation of said final year project?
The IP of my final year (UK) university project belongs to the University not me, and not to the company that was sponsoring me for my final year.
That just shows how ridiculous the laws in UK/US are. Around here, what you're describing would be expressly against the law.
Re: An apology to open source
#137An open note to Nick's Employers - 1) If you are a technology company, this is Harakiri ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku ). You are alienating every developer who is worth her salt. If you have a recruiting arm, and they are trying to recruit, god be with them. Ofcourse, you think people will never come to know, but this has the potential to be a good story and press will pick it up. I will not be surprised if…
plus it's javascript for christ's sake? the best they can do is obfuscate it.
To the people who make decisions like this, it's all 1s and 0s. I mean literally there will probably be some policy pertaining to "software", or some manager freaked about "software" being released. No-one will stop to care about the deployment model when making this call.
Re: An apology to open source
#138Does the company have any jurisdiction over what appears to be Nick's own project? This really sounds ridiculous.
If he's working in the US, then debatably yes. Though 'jurisdiction' isn't the right word. Work performed by an employee during the course of operations is considered 'work for hire', and is the intellectual property of the employer. If he then goes on to replicate a large quantity of that work 'on his own time', he is most likely infringing on that work that he previously did (unless he's very careful about it. Sinc…
This is one side of the argument. The other side is that attempts to own the code the employee does outside of work hours may constitute restraint of trade.
Re: An apology to open source
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
They may be a very good employer. This may have been uncomfortably close to his closed-source day-job. Without details we don't know. And eventually everyone moves on. Company loyalty is dead.
Loyalty is reciprocal. I've never understood why companies expect complete loyalty while simultaneously showing none in return. I also think that it's very unlikely they are 'good employers'. They may pay well, but that's a totally different thing to being a good employer.
If (and this is hypothetical, obviously) the guy open sourced something uncomfortably close to one of their products and uncomfortably close to what he does for his day job, I don't think this is unreasonable.
I am a huge fan of Open Source, but not every company is, and I don't think it makes them a bad employer to have acted this way, given these supposed preconditions. You're correct that pay is only part of the equation, loyalty and respect are also very important. This action doesn't necessarily mean that these things are lacking.
It may well do of course, the world is full of assholes :)
Re: An apology to open source
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he's working in the US, then debatably yes. Though 'jurisdiction' isn't the right word. Work performed by an employee during the course of operations is considered 'work for hire', and is the intellectual property of the employer. If he then goes on to replicate a large quantity of that work 'on his own time', he is most likely infringing on that work that he previously did (unless he's very careful about it. Sinc…
As a non-American, that concept is very alien to me. Say, if a burger-flipping cook at a fast-food joint cooks burgers for himself and a few friends at home, is he infringing? Are those burgers company property? Baffled...
Let me explain. My company's employee manual had a clause stating (and I paraphrase here) that any intellectual property (patentable invention, copyrightable materials, etc) created by the employee was owned by the employer.
Technically, this means that they own the bedtime stories that I make up for my kids. And certainly any open-source code that I may write in my free time, even if I used absolutely NO company resources and worked only on evenings and weekends.
But this story has a happy ending: I signed it (I like getting paid), then went to the company lawyers and raised the issue. I used the "you own my kid's bedtime stories" example and provided alternate language they could consider. (My alternate language said they owned it only if it was written using company time or company resources or if it related to the line of business the company was in.) The next year, they changed it to a variant of my proposed wording (actually, they used "only if written on company time or using company resources" which was an even more expansive exception).
Of course then a few years later we got bought by a new company, and they had a different clause. So I started a conversation with THIS company's lawyers. . .