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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

#61

Post by h4ny »

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 think that's a generally good approach and a fantastic example of framing things professionally but also doesn't fix the core of the problem, which I see problematic if leadership of an engineering-focused company doesn't understand immediately.

Luck with your employer also plays a big part in how you approach this too.

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

#62

Post by somewhatgoated »

beastman82 wrote: post #60
somewhatgoated wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The employees are able to make their own decisions and as written on the site should make sure that they are allowed to contribute - I don’t get why you think that’s a “disgrace” and not debatable

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

#63

Post by tombert »

sheepscreek wrote: post #58
tombert wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I worked at Apple, they were extremely strict about contributions to FOSS stuff, even on your own time, even for simple stuff like bugfixes or opening a Github issue.

I am sure they have their reasons even if I don't agree with them, but it's made me very cautious about making PRs and the like while working at BigCos and making outside contributions to FOSS stuff.

This even more so, though, because of course I was doing it on company time, so I wouldn't really blame them for wanting to audit stuff to ensure I'm not divulging company secrets and the like.

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

#64

Post by aledem »

Generally in every big corporation I worked any request to work on something outside of directly writing code to the company's codebase was answered by the direct manager with "Do it in your free time", even if the justification was provided. In a profit oriented environment only immediate value is considered worth pursuing. The attitude is pretty parasitic and dictated by the constant race for higher efficiency and metrics, which comes from the very top.

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

#65

Post by wiether »

tombert wrote: post #63
sheepscreek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I worked at Apple, they were extremely strict about contributions to FOSS stuff, even on your own time, even for simple stuff like bugfixes or opening a Github issue. I am sure they have their reasons even if I don't agree with them, but it's made me very cautious about making PRs and the like while working at BigCos and making outside contributions to FOSS stuff. This even more so, though, because of course I w…

> even on your own time, even for simple stuff like bugfixes or opening a Github issue

During a recruitment process with a company a few years ago, they quite early asked for my GH profile and complained that I hadn't much content available.

Later, they asked me to do a small exercise and put it on my GH account.

When they sent me the contract, there was a clause telling that I would work for them exclusively and would not be allowed to contribute to anything else than company projects, even in my own time.

I didn't signed, and every person in the process seemed unable to understand what was wrong.

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

#66

Post by SyrupThinker »

Yokohiii wrote: post #35
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_…

Depends on how you frame it, the employee still owns the work in the sense that they are the copyright holder. But the employer is granted exclusive usage rights to the work, so you wouldn't have the rights to license it to someone else as is encouraged in the article.

That would be relevant, for example, when the company goes defunct, and no one else holds any usage rights for the work. Then you'd regain those usage rights.

That of course is iffy to make use of because you'd need to be sure that you are considered the exclusive author, and that no one else acquired these exclusive usage rights.

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

#67

Post by vibbix »

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…

This would be amazing to see upstreamed! I did some similar work for optimizing batch calls for the Quartz Scheduler. I left before it got merged, but was able to follow up and get it in as it was already PR'd.

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

#68

Post by bandofthehawk »

orthogonal_cube wrote: post #55
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 del…

[dead]

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

#69

Post by bluGill »

orthogonal_cube wrote: post #55
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 del…

The customer would probably prefer that you released it - that would mean next time they need a change the previous is up streamed.

Note that the resulting patch is almost assuredly not public domain and you should never use that term.

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

#70

Post by phkahler »

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…

>> 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.

IANAL but if you give your co-worker a copy to run, you've just used the OSS license to be able to do that right? The co-worker now has legal rights granted by the license right? Including to redistribute your changes?

This all seems really silly since pushing changes upstream is by far the best way to be sure the changes are maintained. Not to mention legal uncertainty around maintaining an internal proprietary fork.

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