Absolutely love this!
Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ".
Good point.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#43While 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…
If the current state of programming has showed anything, IP and copyright law don't exists anymore.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#44> "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 wouldn't take a job where the employer wasnt publishing permissively licensed code for all but the production bits. It's demoralizing for me and would stress my soul to the brink. I'd rather be broke.
In the US, you’d definitely be broke. There just aren’t many employers willing to deal with it. All the ones I’ve worked for just use what’s available without modification.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#45This 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 i…
I've seen plenty of the evils you're talking about, managers tend to make terrible engineering decisions and then instruct their engineers to go forth and make it so. I guess what I'm saying is that, as an engineer, your value proposition is that you can shield your manager from getting mired in such details by not asking for their unqualified opinion in the first place.
Just give estimates which include time for not doing things the dumb way, and then don't do things the dumb way. When it comes time to talk about performance reviews, call it "taking ownership."
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#46> "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_…
> in Germany the employer owns all source code created during working hours by default.
Same in most countries I worked in. Generally it's not just the business hours, but also any kind of device used. If code got edited at one point on a company laptop, or during office hours, then it's the company's.
Most intellectual jobs in quant finance will also routinely enforce an intellectual property clause in their work contract, which extends appropriation to anything resulting from the knowledge you acquired at the company. Not sure if that is enforceable in practice, but it's always there.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#47My 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?…
“Sure, let me run this through the compliancy team. Just to make sure there’s no intellectual property infringement. Which repository and issue, exactly?”
it hurts how true this is
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#48Every single fucking employee contract in the US mentions that the company has the right to any work done on company equipment and/or on company time.
This is such a bad idea, it's impressive.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
I've seen plenty of the evils you're talking about, managers tend to make terrible engineering decisions and then instruct their engineers to go forth and make it so. I guess what I'm saying is that, as an engineer, your value proposition is that you can shield your manager from getting mired in such details by not asking for their unqualified opinion in the first place. Just give estimates which include time for not…
Ah yes, agreed!
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#50While 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…
Have you heard of DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin)?