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Comment by Philbrick | Hacker News Reader

Google, my employer, recently refused a request that I made to release as open source some software that I had been working on in my spare time and without using any of their resources, on they claim that my software would compete with one of their projects. :-(

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There's a story in there. Did Google actually have any claims to the software you wrote? If not, then you wouldn't need their persmission (except that now that you asked, they could fire you for disregarding their "advice").

I'd love to hear cdibona's views on that.

I wrote them up last time this came up, you can find it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970191

I work for ITA, which is being acquired by Google, and this is one way in which it's going to be a step down. ITA's noncompete is the narrowest I've seen; it only claims stuff that I do in the travel industry.

As a former ITA employee, I was amazed by how great the ITA inventions agreement was in this respect. It has set the bar for negotiations in my future employment negotiations.

There's a tricky balance to be struck here.

On the one hand, it's not unreasonable that a company paying an employee to work for them should expect a certain degree of loyalty as long as they are taking a company pay cheque. That would reasonably include the employee not directly competing with their employer.

On the other hand, some employers are vast companies, and no one employee can possibly know everything that is going on. Is it really fair to penalise someone who creates a side project completely independently of work, just because it happens to relate to a company project of which the employee had no knowledge? If you allow that, without imposing a corresponding duty on the company to disclose everything they do to every restricted employee so that employees can understand the mutual obligations before making decisions that might be affected by them, doesn't that conflict with the most basic principles of contract law?

Sounds like a good story to blog about and post on HN.

Thanks. I'd like to write about it but, sadly, there are some relatively confidential details there (e.g. information about the Google project that my software would be theoretically competing with) that I can't reveal publicly.

I'm not ready to give up my employment over this (though it does significantly lower the bar for what another organization would need to offer me in order for me to consider switching jobs :-().

Google even prevented one prominent C# expert from renewing his microsoft MVP once he went to work for them - and this was in europe where workers generally have some protection

You are speaking of the one and only Jon Skeet. I think this had something to do with the NDA Microsoft MVPs sign (MVPs get confidential access to future plans, early looks, etc)

And when he waived all gifts and NDA access, he got his MVP status back.

California employment law most likely addresses an employee's "duty of loyalty" to their employer, even in the absence of a contract. This means that you won't compete with the company or work against its interests while remaining in the employ of the company.

You should have told them not to be evil.

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