Does Committing Code to an Open Source Project Mean Committing Career Suicide? | Hacker News Reader

Does Committing Code to an Open Source Project Mean Committing Career Suicide?

softwarequalityconnection.com

25 pointsbconway21 comments

My immediate thought is, "I would prefer not to be employed by a place who is actively in the business of suing their own employees for contributing to open source."

Then I tried to see it from the employer's perspective... And I came to the same conclusion. It's an absolutely ridiculous stance to try to harshly punish employees for spending spare time writing code for an open source project. It's akin to firing and suing a carpenter because he used skills he developed on the job to build a nice rocking chair for the local community center.

If the project is a direct competitor to software that the employee is working on at the office, then politely sit the employee down and discuss the matter. Jumping to termination or even litigation does nothing for you:

a) You garner bad reputation and bad will in the open source community

b) You lose the respect of a former employee who is now likely to badmouth you to anyone within earshot

c) You lose an employee who was so passionate for his craft that he contributed his spare time to an open source project (it will surely be difficult to replace him/her)

d) Litigation is likely to only bring back an amount of money that is probably trivial to your company but devastating to most developers and engineers (see points a and b about generating bad will)

I can go on. As someone else said, most developers who are contributing to open source will not be deterred by such a threat. But the vast majority of developers will likely avoid any company who is known to take part in this practice.

What does the company stand to gain?

> Then I tried to see it from the employer's perspective...

I did the same thing, and I realized that it is in fact quite possible for a programmer to steal code; and furthermore if you are a clueless middle manager with strong reptilian reflexes in any number of bloated bureaucracies throughout the business landscape, then actually it wouldn't be too hard to sue a programmer—rightly or wrongly—through sheer ignorance.

So as much as my instinct is to agree with the prevailing attitude here in the comments, I have to admit that it is probably disturbingly easy to get blindsided by this.

That said, I think you have to go by common sense on these things. "Segregating knowledge" in your brain is nonsense. If you do that you're already crippling yourself as a developer. Ultimately your best protection is to simply not get involved with incompetent and clueless people, and always do good and ethical work. That's not too hard if you are a talented engineer in silicon valley, but probably easier said than done for the average code monkey in a cubicle farm. But in their case, contributing to open source might be the only way they ever pull themselves out of mediocrity thought; I'd take the risk either way.

It's akin to firing and suing a carpenter because he used skills he developed on the job to build a nice rocking chair for the local community center.

While I'm totally on your side of this argument, I think this example is particularly interesting. Everyone except the employer sees a carpenter being charitable. The employer sees the carpenter making a chair of similarity to what they sell. So now the community center no longer purchases a chair from the employer.

Basically, I can see the employers side of the argument if the employee contributes to a competing open source project. Such as an MS Office developer contributing code to Open Office. Not sure if I agree in punishing them, but surely you see why this happens.

I got a C&D from a former employer once for anything I wrote and had on my web site during the five years I worked there.

On my attorney's advice, I wrote them back and asked them to be more specific about which things I had on my site that they were claiming rights to so I could honor their IP rights and take it down immediately. Didn't hear from them again.

Big company? Small company?

It was a sort of medium sized thing. In the telco industry. They've since been subject to some kind of acquisition, which I assume was part of the motivation.

Technically true, but everyone knows this already. The GNU GPL 2.0 (1991) advises employees get their boss to sign-off on contributions:

You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989

Ty Coon, President of Vice

Note, I'm hoping this extract of the GNU GPL is "fair use", otherwise I'd have to quote it verbatim.

The rules of ownership vary by country, and even by US state! That section might be intended to accommodate a diverse audience.

Bleh. Ridiculous. The article also doesn't actually site a single example of OSS contributions actually leading to the scary scenarios it leads with.

It's written in a very scary way. Like FUD.

I mean, even if you get sued for some reason, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of the world or "career suicide". In most countries, the sentence in a civilian lawsuit is not death.

This is a crock. Sure, if you have signed an article waiving all your rights and IF that is persued and IF a court rules that shit you did in your own time, on your own initiative, for your own reasons belongs to your employer, then yeah, you might get in trouble, or even fired.

And that's career suicide... how? Most good development shops aren't going to look down on you, they're going to look down on your former employer. Because that's a dick move.

If by "Career" you mean "Lifetime working for petty, greedy corporate douchbags with no respect for you, your profession or your independent existence" then yeah, you might have a problem. But really, who on this board wants that?

What kind of FUD is this? Far from killing it, contributing to Open Source projects is what made my career possible. My OS contributions serve as a combination resume/code sample and the community I work with make excellent references as well as a pipeline for the occasional consulting gig.

Are there any real-world examples of the kind of suit the OP talks about?

My employer prefers to hire coders who work on open source software. They say that they have done the math and has found that it has a significant correlation with the person being worth hiring. Means that they're genuinely keen on coding, and all that.

Is this really a problem outside the US? I have never encountered a "any code you write while employed belongs to the company" clause outside the US, and I don't think it would be valid in any European country. IANAL, of course, but I find the thought ridiculous. An employer buys work hours, not my life. If I want to hack on Open Source in the evening (or whenever, off-work), that's my prerogative.

Noncompetition clauses might be a larger problem, but that's also pretty simple to spot. The best employers have you develop code to solve their problems, and then let you open source it, anyway.

I try to always mention that I have personal projects that may or may not be related to work that I'll work on in my off time, and that I've contributed to open source in the past and plan to do so in the future. The examples I tend to give are bug fixes and minor features.

If there's weird wording about this in your contract, it's probably a sign of control freaks being in charge, in which case you should run as quickly as possible.

This shouldn't be a problem as long as you're willing to:

- not sign, in the first place, any NDA or confidentiality agreement that would extend the employer's right to anything that 1) you work on your own time and 2) isn't directly related to the current field of work you're doing for the employer

- in general, steer away from employers that spend time worrying about their employees leaking out their precious knowhow

- to enforce the above choices should you find yourself in such a situation; in other words, walk away real soon now

As a Perl programmer, contributions to open source (CPAN) are a plus rather than a minus. Even with code that is not of general use (mine parses chess games) such things generally add to managements estimation of your worth--- at least up the chain as high as they understand what CPAN is :)

I understand that this technically could be a problem. But is it actually a problem in real life? Has anyone actually been sued for something like this?

What a load of horse shit. The place that is willing to sue open source developers is the place that gets shitty programmers.

The developer that worries about this is probably not really into open source to start with.

Hey, now that's not fair.

Just because a person works for a restrictive company has nothing to do with whether they're into OSS or not. For example, they could have been out of a job for a while and this was a breath of fresh air. Or, the company they chose to work for happened to be developing things they wanted to be a part of. Or, they believe there were competent engineers at that company and that they could learn from them.

And furthermore, "the developer that worries"? Really? I take personal offense to that, probably because I am in this exact situation. I worry about everything of this sort. I try to do nothing outside of work that could be somehow construed to be related to work. Why? Because I don't want the work to be taken from me and myself to be sued, or fired or any number of terrible things. Is it likely to happen? No. But you know what? It's worth taking those extra measures to make sure I'm not working on anything that could bring about negative consequences.

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