by giansegato on 12/5/21, 9:05 AM with 319 comments
by cassianoleal on 12/5/21, 1:14 PM
They went back to the lawyers and came back to me saying that this is not the first time this has been brought up, that the contract was standard across the org and was originally written for managerial types and C-suites, and that the company had never even considered taking over an employee's off-hours work, open source or otherwise.
I said good, then it should not be a problem to remove the clause. They said they would have another discussion and would really like it for me to join. I said great, then once you issue me a contract with that clause I'll be happy to join, assuming I hadn't found something else.
They never came back to me. For years I wondered if anything had actually changed. Reading this tweet I'm glad I declined.
by marcinzm on 12/5/21, 1:06 PM
edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.
by kgeist on 12/5/21, 9:59 AM
by notacoward on 12/5/21, 2:34 PM
"We don't seem to have a copy of your employee agreement on file. Could you please sign the attached copy and return it?"
Haha, no. What are they going to do, fire me? I went down and explained the situation to her, and we had a good laugh. Never did sign. All of the company's own IP turned out to be worthless BTW, and they were lucky they didn't get sued for misappropriating IP from the CTO's previous employer (DEC). Companies doing this is a huge red flag not only because of its grasping nature but because it often reveals a general kind of awfulness among its principals and/or backers.
by _6lik on 12/5/21, 10:08 PM
So from what I understand is that everything I do on conpany property (that includes coding in a pub but on the company laptop) belongs to the company.
So what I do is to first code it (any new idea that I'm working on) at home on my personal setup (including cloud an all). Then I release everything on a Apache V2 + MIT combo with CC BY SA 4 (for pics, vids etc) that I think covers everything.
Then I host it under a github organisation (I am the admin of the org but the code is not hosted directly in my profile). Then I go back to the office next morning and ask one of the junior team members to fork it.
In my head, I'm thinking that yeah well, I wrote something in my personal capacity somewhere and then somebody from the company forked it, so that's not my problem.
So far so good... And the department is too much dependent on me so avoids any confrontation anyway. But I have always wondered, if this is fool proof? Can somebody find any loopholes in this approach and make it better...
by PragmaticPulp on 12/5/21, 2:48 PM
However, my local laws provide some additional protection against this type of thing. I didn’t even realize it until I consulted with a lawyer who pointed out that my state’s laws don’t allow companies to claim IP generated in off hours. Of course, consult with a lawyer to confirm which jurisdiction actually applies to your employment.
As a manager on the other side of the table, I’ve had some strange experiences: On more than one occasion, employees have tried to open-source things they wrote for us without asking. Juniors especially may not fully understand the bounds of IP ownership, to the point that they think code they wrote is theirs, even if written for their job as paid works for hire. I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening here, but after seeing developers walk straight into situations where they’re releasing company code without permission I reserve judgment when I see situations like this. If these libraries were developed on company time for company work products then the developer may not have a particularly strong claim for his ownership.
On the other hand, if these are entirely unreleased to his work then of course this is a ridiculous request.
EDIT: A quick look at the source code suggests this situation might not be as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments here suggest. Both of the repos in question appear to be derivative works of projects that Badoo (aka Bumble, the developer's employer) owns. The MVIKotlin library opens with this statement:
> This project is inspired by Badoo MVICore library.
And the Decompose repo has this statement in the opening:
> This project is inspired by Badoos RIBs fork of the Uber RIBs framework.
And unless I'm missing something, the developer worked for Badoo (Bumble) during the entire period. It would be extremely difficult to argue that a derivative work of your employer's IP, written during your time of employment and possibly during work time, is fully independent of the company. If the developer used these projects in any way for their work at Bumble (e.g. actually using these tools or libraries as part of the app) or he used company equipment/time/resources while building them, then it would be virtually impossible to argue that these works were not partially work-for-hire as part of his employment.
by amanaplanablog on 12/5/21, 3:05 PM
When building a side project I use one of the names from my prior inventions list.
by btrettel on 12/5/21, 3:23 PM
> I've always thought that if a company claims rights over what you do outside worktime, they should do it not only for your genial ideas, but for the bad ones too. So, if you incur in a stupid debt it must belong to the company. Your newborn baby? The company mus pay alimony. It's all or nothing!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1113065
Edit: I found a Slashdot comment that makes the same point:
> When the company has a blanket policy that takes the employee's inventions, it can come to bite them in the ass.
> When I was illegally fired by Microsystems, Inc. ("MSI") they took possession of work I did on my own time using my own tools. However, on the workers comp. claim their denial was based on the claim the tendinitis was caused in part by my work at home. Either MSI fraudulently denied the workers comp. claim, or committed fraud by asserting and taking possession of the work I did on my own time.
> By having a blanket policy of owning everything you do, the employer could be on the hook for everything you do.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2667463&cid=39013649
by sdwolfz on 12/5/21, 12:05 PM
Here is a link to what my previous employment contract stated about copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24220800 (right now I'm just a shareholder in a company and not employed). Basically it says employer owns all, and I'd like that to say something else... but what?
by whats-the-hype on 12/5/21, 7:47 PM
If you compare arkann1985's MVIKotlin vs badoo/MVICore it's an understatement to say it was "inspired by". It looks like an almost identical clone.
And as others have pointed out, it's not like Bumble is going after all of this guy's projects, just the ones where he was "inspired by" company work.
It would be difficult to argue that the projects in question would exist without benefiting from his employment at Bumble where the originals were developed.
by greatgib on 12/5/21, 11:35 AM
There is lot of discussion about the ownership of the code, but what about the other things related to the project? Like stars and issues.
In no way stars and issues belongs to the company, they belongs to each user that submitted them.
They submitted them to the project that was on a specific username. So, I'm not sure that the company could legally ask to take over that by force without the user agreeing.
Imagine if a company ask that "you transfer your likes to us"...
by pjc50 on 12/5/21, 10:21 AM
by kisamoto on 12/5/21, 2:47 PM
Some employers make the excuse that it's only during office hours; others claim that this clause would "never actually be used".
In my experience it is rarely removed. I've turned down jobs because of it and others that I have accepted I have been extremely worried something like this would happen. I feel for the employee in question and hope they are able to retain control of their open-source code. Maybe this bad publicity encourages others to push back in the future because I generally find this behaviour quite unacceptable.
by swiftcoder on 12/5/21, 10:19 AM
Ownership would allow them to relicense the employees original contributions, but they'd still need to negotiate with or replace all code by other contributors, and they can't un-opensource the existing codebase, right?
by activitypea on 12/5/21, 3:27 PM
1) MVIKotlin - "Extendable MVI framework [...] inspired by Badoo MVICore library"
2) Decompose - "Kotlin BLoCs [...] inspired by Badoos RIBs fork of the Uber RIBs framework"
I hate corporations more than most people here, but this might be as black and white as the title and comment section imply
by neilv on 12/5/21, 10:21 PM
* "Ask HN: What should early startup Employee Agreements require, and not?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26016445
If some founder wants to figure out how to do employee agreements better, they could be more equitable, and be more appealing than the scary FAANG document a hiring candidate is comparing it to.
by anonymousiam on 12/5/21, 11:33 PM
by lkramer on 12/5/21, 2:39 PM
by DarthNebo on 12/5/21, 10:13 AM
With remote work becoming more pervasive, employees should really not be doing any personal things on work computers because their traffic is definitely going to be analysed by someone or some system.
Just a general reminder as well - Companies/Govt's would absolutely love for GitHub/Gitlab or any social platform to require ID card verification for users if that was on the table.
by DoingIsLearning on 12/5/21, 9:43 AM
Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.
by buro9 on 12/5/21, 5:53 PM
1) They asked you to work on this as part of your employment
2) You worked on this during your employed hours
3) You worked on this on employer provided equipment
If you can prove that this is an undertaking of your own (especially if it pre-dates employment) and you avoid doing any work (not even replying to Git issues) during work hours, and only ever on your own hardware... then your employer has no grounds for claim at all.
by Debugreality on 12/5/21, 5:47 PM
I got it removed before joining but looking back it was one of the most toxic placed I'd ever worked and this was just one of a number of red flags.
by hackbinary on 12/5/21, 5:16 PM
Employment tribunals and courts take a dim view of wage theft, and that is exactly what this is if your employer is trying to enforce that clause.
Get advice from an employment lawyer.
by pabs3 on 12/5/21, 10:07 AM
by Clubber on 12/5/21, 11:05 PM
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
by joeyh on 12/5/21, 12:30 PM
Copyight cannot demand this ridiculous thing.
by rootusrootus on 12/5/21, 10:54 PM
My current company operates this way. The employment contract was pretty generic and didn't really have much IP-related language in it. But the first stock grant had a document that was quite a lot more specific. Fortunately nothing as onerous as described in this Twitter post, but still, it was good that I read all the documents before accepting the grant.
by buzzwords on 12/5/21, 11:57 AM
by geofft on 12/5/21, 2:57 PM
If we're talking about hobby projects, that's different, but it seems from this tweet that this is something that could have been written internally as part of someone's job and never open-sourced, right?
by yawnxyz on 12/6/21, 1:14 PM
I'm about to work on a grant, with another PI at University of Sydney for a project we've worked on for four years. This grant is to advance our mission of building software system for supporting personalized bacteriophage therapy. Essentially, we're building software to make personalized therapy possible in this space, so we're building something critical for the project.
We're building the software to get funding to "phase 2" which is 50x (8 figures) the amount of money the grant's already received. Currently we're employed on the project as contract researchers, but we (and our PI) wants us there in Australia in person. Since we're based in the US/Can, we need to get work visas, which require us to be employed by the grant directly.
My question is: we have to sign employment agreements for the university, and our contracts look very much like the "we'll take everything you own, including your ideas you came up with in your shower at your own home" kind of contracts. We've already pushed back and laid out our position — we want to be able to continue building this project past the length of employment and past Phase 2, whether we get it or not. I don't really care if they get full, perpetual license to whatever I create there; it's most likely going to be OSS anyway. I just don't want them to prevent us from using it or OSS-ing it in the future.
Has anyone else dealt with universities and institutions in this manner? Do they usually operate like companies in this way?
by eximius on 12/5/21, 5:18 PM
So sometimes changing the wording isn't the only way to get your goal. Amendments/clarifications in writing can work.
by ToddWBurgess on 12/5/21, 10:57 PM
by mellosouls on 12/5/21, 11:46 AM
by dbg31415 on 12/5/21, 4:12 PM
Making it one-step harder for lawyers is generally all it takes.
Don't draw lines from your GitHub account that you use at work to the GitHub account that holds your side projects.
Every time I start with a new company, I spin up a new GitHub account just for that company.
Sorry this happened to you.
by Buttons840 on 12/5/21, 5:07 PM
Let's say me and a friend develop a library together, then my company asks for ownership of it. Sorry, I can't legally do that, because I myself only own half the code.
by pawelwentpawel on 12/5/21, 5:53 PM
Finding a non-negotiable blanket clause like this in a contract would most probably stop me from taking the interviews or at least establish completely different salary expectations. I would understand if the work would be done on company's equipment or during some allocated time but a blanket one like this? If you're not paying me for 168 hours per week and there is no clear conflict of interest, bug off from my side projects I do in my own time.
by dehrmann on 12/5/21, 10:41 PM
As a developer using open source code, how can you ever have enough certainty that an open source project won't run into issues like this?
by rainmaking on 12/5/21, 2:26 PM
by StefanoC on 12/5/21, 8:15 PM
It's easy to grab the pitchfork, I hate that contract clause as all of you do, but without clear information on the above this case could go either way.
by game_the0ry on 12/6/21, 6:41 PM
[1] https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1467914399381925888
by RamblingCTO on 12/6/21, 2:11 PM
by michael7463 on 12/12/21, 12:03 PM
by eterevsky on 12/6/21, 6:16 AM
by ChrisMarshallNY on 12/5/21, 6:34 PM
I am very glad that I never had one, with the company that employed me, for a long time.
by justshowpost on 12/5/21, 12:10 PM
by questiondev on 12/6/21, 4:53 PM
by bicepjai on 12/7/21, 7:24 AM
by game_the0ry on 12/6/21, 12:08 AM
by arpa on 12/5/21, 8:10 PM
by quiffledwerg on 12/5/21, 12:38 PM
https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1446071099989663745?s=...
Surely we can overlook the whole “give us your damn open source personal projects copyright grab or you’ll be chewing on big legal problems buddy” thing given the companies generosity with cake?
The cake shows that Bumble really are good people.
Reminds me of those famous words “speak softly and carry a big cake”.
by beervirus on 12/5/21, 11:35 PM
Uhhhh… if the employer owns it, it presumably isn’t going to be licensed as open source.