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Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time

ossresistance.com

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31–40 of 93 posts

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

#31

Post by em-bee »

shimman wrote: post #15
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…

This doesn't apply to every state. In California you have the California Labor Code Section 2870 which prohibits employers from stealing workers IP.

that does not apply to work done during work hours or on company equipment.

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

#32

Post by NewJazz »

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

Luckily in California your own time is your own time.

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

#33

Post by blurbleblurble »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #3

This is a good idea, a great idea even, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to position it as "resistance". Your job, likely, is to achieve some goal. You're the specialist who gets to decide how to achieve that goal. If open source software is part of that decision, then maintaining it is should also part of that decision. It's not radical, it's just doing your job by protecting the future stability and maintainabilit…

It's also just good business sense. Companies that promote collaboration via open source are promoting the ecosystem that feeds their business.

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

#34

Post by Aurornis »

prmoustache wrote: post #23

> "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…

I think they were trying to say that you shouldn't try to commit work that is not yours to give away. There's another section down below about it, but the bullet point up top became confusing.

This point is obvious to devs with more experience but has been a real problem with some junior devs at some of my companies: They see something cool the company is doing in an internal project and think it would make a great contribution to some open source project, without thinking about the problems with using their knowledge of closed-source code to submit substantially similar code (or in some cases, copy and pasting) to an open source project.

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

#35

Post by Yokohiii »

prmoustache wrote: post #23

> "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…

I have never investigated, but I was under the impression that in Germany the employer owns all source code created during working hours by default.

Most employers that are not IT focused wont even understand what open source is or how it works. So I guess it's hopeless for many to get permission.

The linked site should probably focus on explaining benefits of open source and advocate legal guidelines for _employers_ primarily.

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

#36

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission

If any of the work is related to what you do for your job this is true.

If the work is not related to the job it depends on the state. Many states have limitations on what employers can claim as their IP. Generic contracts will try to claim everything because they keep the language broad, but laws often say that an employer can't claim work you did in your free time if it wasn't related to the employer.

If you do the work during work hours or you use the company laptop, they would have a claim to it. Most companies aren't going to care, but you shouldn't get relaxed about this because you want to keep everything clean if a dispute arises.

Do the work on your own time, on your own hardware, and don't overlap the work you're hired to do or anything you might have been exposed to during your time at work.

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

#39

Post by jonas21 »

Aurornis wrote: post #36
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…

> Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission If any of the work is related to what you do for your job this is true. If the work is not related to the job it depends on the state. Many states have limitations on what employers can claim as their IP. Generic contracts will try to claim everything because they keep the language broad, but laws of…

Yes, but the title of this page is literally "Keep OSS alive on company time".

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

#40

Post by aleqs »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #3

This is a good idea, a great idea even, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to position it as "resistance". Your job, likely, is to achieve some goal. You're the specialist who gets to decide how to achieve that goal. If open source software is part of that decision, then maintaining it is should also part of that decision. It's not radical, it's just doing your job by protecting the future stability and maintainabilit…

While I agree with everything you say, the reality of most tech companies these days (based on my experience), is that they will not even invest time into maintaining their own infrastructure and libraries unless forced to do so - much less OSS. Building useless features for gaming metrics, enshitification, dark patterns, borderline malware/hype integration - all would be prioritized over foundational infra/library investments.
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