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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#451

Post by contravariant »

Clamchop wrote: post #88
pc86 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which likely means your "free time" code you decided to do to make your job easier now belongs to your employer since they asked you to write it (albeit indirectly in this situation). Especially when you have problem A at work, then some time later write "generic code" that solves problem A, then some time later "import" the code to your dayjob to solve problem A. And double so if nobody else ever uses this generic…

Ethically, I'm not sure how to slice it. I'm operating on what you wrote here rather than this specific story. Some contracts stipulate that anything you write while employed is owned by your employer. (I'm settled in that this is unethical, but it's reasonable to comply.) But let's suppose there's no such stipulation. You get an idea while at work. Everyone gets ideas. You take your brain home with you (I hope) and…

It's not cut and dried but precisely because of that it is not a situation you should create lightly.

I think there's nothing wrong if you have a brilliant idea that happens to be useful to your employer to make some agreement that you work on it in your own time and grant the employer the use of the code. But you can't just do this unilaterally, and if you do don't expect the employer to take your side.

Just as you should have the right to decide what copyright to sell and what not the employer should have the right to assume they own the copyright to the code they paid for, unless stipulated otherwise.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#452

Post by swores »

robertlagrant wrote: post #422
kome wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i understand ownership, but software and code are so easy to copy, transfer and modify that it would be stupid not to do it. it's not like stealing a car. arrr in other words: ownership of immaterial goods is mostly a scam

It wouldn't be stupid not to. It would be ethical not to. You can do it, but you'd better hope you live in a world where most people don't do it.

Would the world definitely be a worse place if the laws were amended to say "any software developer owns equal IP rights to the code they create as part of their jobs along with the company, so either party can do anything they want with it"?

I'm not sure it would - although it disadvantages the companies compared to the current situation, it's not like they would choose to stop hiring devs to work for them - and that's just a legalisation of the currently unethical behaviour that you think is definitely a worse situation to have?

It's interesting to think about, at least!

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#453

Post by prmoustache »

mkii wrote: post #177
ipython wrote: post #144

Best quote: "People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!” This is so true. People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a…

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

Actually that was the first thing I looked for in the comments, even before finishing the article and seeing he even published the finished code on his own repo (and not box or uber one), under his only name.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#454

Post by mbreese »

glandium wrote: post #420
justinwp wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be surprised how easy this process is at some big tech companies. For me the bigger hurdle is getting past a privacy review, not the issue of the license.

Story time. In a past life, I tried to open source code I wrote at work. My manager greenlit it, but obviously that wasn't enough. Next thing I know, I'm in a room with a lawyer trying to write a patent. In the end, no patent was filed, and the code was never open sourced. What a waste. Arguably, that was 15+ years ago, it would probably go down differently now...

I do academic research and write a ton of code to support this. In grad school (many years ago) at a Midwestern state school, I try to release some code under GPL and get blocked by the school's tech transfer department. It's a program that was designed to support the lab research we were doing (LIMS, ordering, etc). It wasn't much, but it very much made our lab run better. In the end, they licensed it out to a start up that flamed out. The entire process was messy, but all I really wanted was to release it with a GPL license and get on with my work. That office made my life quite difficult through grad school.

Fast forward a few years and I'm now at Stanford and then later UCSF. I email the tech transfer office about some code I'm planning on publishing, expecting a similar back and forth. It took all of two minutes to get back an email:

Are you planning on making money with this code? If so, let us know. If not, any open source license is fine with us.

It was a quite refreshing change to deal with institutions that knew what they were doing w.r.t. IP.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#455

Post by troupe »

concordDance wrote: post #413
lovich wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s still just theft if you’re not a contractor? Full time software employees are doing work for hire. There’s plenty of moral and ideological arguments about theft being morally acceptable in this situation but I was more marveling at the people who thought that taking source code from their company was legally not theft

It's not theft, it's copyright infringement and is very morally and practically different from theft. The range of circumstances in which it is morally acceptable are MUCH broader.

There are situations where developers emailed/cloud uploaded/took hard drive of code they had been working on when he left the organization and were looking at prison sentences for theft...not copyright infringement. They didn't even give it to someone or reuse it somewhere. Just the fact of trying to keep it when they left as illegal.

All that to say that in some circumstances taking source code is considered theft.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#456

Post by troupe »

stickfigure wrote: post #184
mkii wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

If we're being generous, the author may have had permission to do so. It's not inconceivable; the code was abandoned. If one of my reports had asked, I would have approved.

That might happen at a small organization, but in large orgs, it is rarely that simple.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#457

Post by thecodedmessage »

egwor wrote: post #399
kqr wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this seems fairly clearly illegal. That said, I think OP is morally in the right here, and I wish I had the guts to do similar things. Sharing code is a good thing. Helping one company innovate using code that another company chose to ignore is also a good thing.

I'm not sure how we weigh up the morals here. If you've done something using a companies resources (laptop, desk, chair etc.) and they're paying you and the contract says they own it I don't see how you can have a moral high ground. Maybe there should be some way to allow these ownership concepts to expire so that society benefits overall but right now we don't have that.

When property does not serve its purpose it is no longer morally binding, just legally. And that’s if you convince me proprietary code ownership has any moral standing at all. Sometimes, I follow the law not because it’s particularly the right thing to do but because I don’t want to get in any trouble.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#458

Post by robertlagrant »

swores wrote: post #452
robertlagrant wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be stupid not to. It would be ethical not to. You can do it, but you'd better hope you live in a world where most people don't do it.

Would the world definitely be a worse place if the laws were amended to say "any software developer owns equal IP rights to the code they create as part of their jobs along with the company, so either party can do anything they want with it"? I'm not sure it would - although it disadvantages the companies compared to the current situation, it's not like they would choose to stop hiring devs to work for them - and tha…

It massively disadvantages the company. Why pay for software to be built that can just be taken by your software engineers, who form a new company and run a competing product?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#459

Post by swores »

robertlagrant wrote: post #458
swores wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the world definitely be a worse place if the laws were amended to say "any software developer owns equal IP rights to the code they create as part of their jobs along with the company, so either party can do anything they want with it"? I'm not sure it would - although it disadvantages the companies compared to the current situation, it's not like they would choose to stop hiring devs to work for them - and tha…

It massively disadvantages the company. Why pay for software to be built that can just be taken by your software engineers, who form a new company and run a competing product?

Well if that were the situation for all companies, the answer to why pay is the same as it is now - even if it doesn't provide so much of a moat, they have a business need for certain code so they pay in order to have and run that code.

(I'm not sure if it would be better or worse myself, I suspect it might not make much of a difference when everything balances out.)

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#460

Post by report-to-trees »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #148
bastawhiz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I asked at the time, and I did it. If either company wants to start a legal fight over a pile of code that neither of them wanted that's old enough to be in elementary school, they know how to reach me.

The problem is that you are claiming ownership of this code and by making it available on GitHub under an MIT license you are claiming that you have the right to do so. If I take that code and make a billion dollar business out of it, Box or Uber could then claim a share of it. That's the kind of things that companies do with the lawyers on retainer. I then sue you for falsely claiming that you own it. You are partic…

Is there any other industry where workers are so beholden to their employers that they cannot simply create something of their own without fear of legal action?

How did we get to this point as an industry and how do we change this destopia?

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