Comment by joshes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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