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Comment by TheCoreh | Hacker News Reader

I live in Brazil. Under Brazilian labor laws, a work week is defined as 44 hours, with each work day having up to 8 hours. So you just excluded companies that have ever had anyone do more than one hour of (paid) overtime any week. Which is basically every company in my country, considering (occasional, paid) overtime is normal and predicted in the relevant laws.

Here, 12 hour shifts with 36 hour rest periods is also the norm for security guards, etc. (So that 4 can provide 24h security) That results in more than 45 hours every other week.

The license also doesn't specify how to remedy the situation in case it's ever violated, which feels very draconian and not very pragmatic.

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It's a bit worse than it seems, because lunch breaks are not included, so whereas an American would call his 9-to-5 job a 40 hour work week, it would be equivalent to a 35 hour Brazilian work week. A Brazilian work day is usually 8h30 to 18h18 so that 44h will fit into 5 days. You can see how adding a commute of at least and hour (could easily be 2h or 3h in São Paulo or Rio) will simply eat up your whole day.

I think a reduction of the 44h week is long due in Brazil and I don't understand why there isn't more pressure from workers. They probably don't have the time to protest.

> I think a reduction of the 44h week is long due in Brazil and I don't understand why there isn't more pressure from workers.

I found the expectations around what you're supposed to do during work hours to be very different between Brazil and US.

Extreme conditions obviously exist, (e.g. telemarketers, which are usually _continuously_ taking calls) but from my observation a significant portion of those 44 hours is spent idling or socializing.

I think proposing any change in work hours under the current political and socioeconomic climate (12% unemployment) wouldn't be feasible, and without the needed shift in work culture our productivity would probably fall further behind.

I don't know, I think 9 to 6 has been becoming more of the norm here as well. All the places I have worked so far (maybe I've been unlucky) have expected more of a 9 to 6 (give or take an hour shift in either direction) than a 9 to 5 cadence.

Also, I don't know many people who work a strict 9 to 5 in office jobs, many take work home with them or are expected to always be available even on weekends should something come up. Not saying this is good, but I don't think strict 9-5 is the norm anymore.

>8h30 to 18h18

Can you explain this notation?

It seems fairly self-explanatory to me, but the second result of a Google search for "time h notation" gave me this (the first was documentation for the time.h header):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Fr...

> So you just excluded companies that have ever had anyone do more than one hour of (paid) overtime any week.

I think this was entirely the point of the license. The authors presumably believe that companies shouldn't make their workers work this long, and they don't want those companies to do to benefit from their work. Thus providing an (admittedly small) incentive for those companies to reduce their working hours.

I think this worry is reasonable.

Maybe you can try to file a pull request to suggest a change, remember to explain your situation and concerns inside the pull request so it won't be discarded.

The issue with licenses is that you can't just change them around like you want. The GPLv2 in the Linux kernel for example is almost impossible to get exchanged due to the giant amount people who possibly hold copyright. You need agreement of every single one of them.

Personally, I don't even believe they can receive that many stars on GitHub. The fact they did amazed me.

Of course I understand ask some projects to suddenly change their license to support anti-996 is hard and unreal, but hey, the show of force and well there is already a win.

For me, the step they've taken to reach out for support (by ask others to change their code license etc) is already something positively progressive. Regardless whether or not they did successfully convinced anyone.

They got the message out, that's important.

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