IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal email address

Legal were so backlogged that approval for anything other than a strategic project was impossible.

I was not allowed to submit work to unapproved projects, other than my personal stuff I'd listed as my own IP on being hired.

It's usually about IP protection ahead of brand protection.

2870. (a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:

(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or

(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.

(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

Very popular with employers, of course: You get to avoid the minor risk of them embarrassing you; you reduce their job market value by preventing them from having a portfolio or any public profile; you remove non-work distractions from their free time; and you get to vacuum up any IP they generate outside of work hours.

So naturally, employers want to normalise the idea.

Then they should pay 168 hours / week and not 40

> You're more or less representing them.

No you don't

The hell means 'being Googler'? I'm not a Xer because I'm employed at X. Wake up.

"

2870 (a) Any provision in an employment agreement stating that an employee should assign any of his rights in an invention to his employer shall not apply to an invention which the employee develops totally on his time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for the inventions which:

2871 Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or anticipated research or development of the employer

2872 Result from any work done by the employee for the employer.

"

In the state of California clauses assigning _all_ IP to the employer in an employment contract are not legal, and hence unenforceable.

Obviously that gets trickier if the company is like, Microsoft which at least has tried to make every kind of software imaginable. But most companies do pretty much one thing, and I am free to develop whatever else besides that on my own time. It seems reasonable.

The IBM employee is being forced to represent IBM under his official email alias regardless of whether the IBM employee acknowledges IBM owns his work product around the clock.

Employees giving themselves personnal privileges using company resources, while being specifically asked to remove themselves from those that they had has employee, is vastly different context than "he was there as a hobby and ibm cracked down on him".

When it comes to open source contributions, both business conduct guidelines and open source mandatory yearly certs are unambiguous about transparency and approval of open source contributions. So it's pretty mandatory I think to inform, and limited if any impetus not to open open about it.

Working for a big corporation is a bit cyberpunky/Snowcrashy in that way I suppose.

I've worked for startups in Washington and California. In Washington, there was an invention clause in my contracts, but in practice it was a) practically unenforceable and b) as long as you divorced your work identity from your personal identity, nobody cared. This meant not having a way of tracing an anonymous handle or email to you working for the company. In California, I've never seen an invention clause in my contracts, but they were also much better at divorcing your work and personal identity systematically (forcing you to use a github account specific to the company, not mentioning this handle on your personal account, etc.).

In any case, keeping your work and personal work completely separate (no competition between work and individual ideas, no shared hardware) is a good idea and won't raise as many eyebrows. Some companies will be more aggressive about owning what you do, so if it matters to you then ask about the clause before signing the contract.

Its not something to worry about most of the time. At least here in Australia the below situation would be very unenforceable

> if I wrote a sequel to Gone with the Wind, they would have had the rights to it.

A company buys your time and the IP in and around the industry your job is in. Like you can't steal customers, you can't steal IP. If you're paid to come up with a new product/idea you can't just resign and become a competitor you'll get sued for that.

But if your a programmer and write a sequel to Gone with the Wind even if your contract states that the company owns your ideas it won't stand up in a court if the company tries to take ownership. So long as you didn't use company hardware or information which can only be gotten at that company.

my buddy who works at Amazon can't do game jams or even mess around with any personal game or web development at all without getting HR to explicitly sign off on it.

And it is very possible that the university you are currently at owns some rights to your current work (it's a complex legal topic, but a lot of schools do have a copyright transfer in their rules).

Remember that in the software engineering industry, the (competent) engineer is the hot commodity. If your employer turns out a bad apple, just leave to a different one. That's what keeps the nonsense in check -- not regulations, but competition for the best employees. For employees this is a great situation to be in. Unlike in other industries.

You can negotiate your agreements if you see something objectionable in them. (Read them!)

_However_, if I had a side project I wanted to work on, I can get clearance to pursue it, so long as it doesn't compete with any of the company's ventures. It's a straightforward process, not a big deal at all.

They're just trying to get ahead of/avoid potential ambiguous IP ownership situations.

Some of them will try it on, whether its enforceable or not is another matter. Always good to watch out for such clauses and object to them.

For someone to continue to work on the very same piece of software that they have worked on on the clock and expect their employer to accept they have no rights to it would seem dicey in a lot of jurisdictions without having some explicit agreement in place.

Yes, I think including an exchange with your manager in a commit message is a leak, and one way the employee was able to get back at their manager for the draconian response. I don't think it's unprofessional. It's well within their right to write whatever commit message they want to an open source project. No identifiable information was included.

> Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.

No, my response is when you have people in charge who can't see the cost / benefit of actions and take the one that's emotionally charged (maybe because they were annoyed or had a rough day) but ultimately damaging over one that is more beneficial (to the employee, to the company, to the manager's career), you may be working in a dysfunctional company.

> At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.

I don't have an opinion on this. You can be "combative" in a professional way. You challenge process changes with data. Asking questions is not combative, by the way.

Although, when a group of workers decide to band together to fight back, that's a different story, and that's when things get interesting. :D

I turned the job down. The whole process wasted tons of my time and theirs and could have been avoided if they had just been upfront about their policies instead of writing useless crap about how great their culture is in the job ad.

This IBM employee isn't allowed to contribute to VNIC. Why? I dunno. But the problem isn't if a personal address is used or not, but rather this specific IBM employee can't contribute to VNIC.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the fairness of that, but rather that the OP was saying "it wouldn't have been any better if they had used their IBM address."

To your last point... I doubt that's what's happening here. I don't think IBM wants ownership, but rather is protecting themselves from any sort of litigation or undermining an agreement.

I hope their pay reflects that and is 3x the average.

There’s more going on here than is visible from the out-of-context quote in the commit message.

The important bit might be: what state he is in. Then to a lesser extent, what kind of work he does for IBM and what kind of work he does on the kernel.

That would instantly make me start to execute on becoming an IBM employee 0% of my time.

All communication, inherently, must be intepreted. Administrative actions and warnings have no special exemption from this.

Sorry but that violates FLSA. You're only an employee when you're doing work. They don't own you.

And that's assuming we even have an accurate statement, which is a big assumption. Aside from the missing context, we frankly don't know that any of this text was written by the manager.

Manager: You're not allowed to contribute to VNIC.

Employee: But I'm doing it on my spare time!

Manager: You're still not allowed to contribute to VNIC.

Employee: But I'm using my personal email.

Manager: * the email quoted *

---

It feels like someone who's hit the end of their rope with a long back-and-forth and is trying to close any remaining loopholes just to be done with the conversation.

I imagine if I'd worked with legal on something like this as the manager, they'd have advised me to convey the reasoning in a verbal, non-recorded meeting, and then for confirmation just issue a terse command with limited leak damage potential: "As discussed, please remove yourself..."

I am not US based nor a faang worker.

My point was about how difficult it is for a blue collar worker to push back against anything, and while I appreciate that it may be difficult for you, or any other programmer, have a look at us lower slobs as well.

You strike? Okay discussion? We strike? We get attacked physically and online with groups we cannot help but be drown out by

The other side of the coin is the much larger group of people who struggle to find any job that will pay the bills. If they can get one it's a dice roll whether their boss treats them with some decency or not. They can't "quit if it's shit" because they might not be able to find another job and they risk starving or getting evicted.

That said, fundamentally, the question is whether you trust in Lijun Pan to represent the situation without distorting it. Without evidence to the contrary my personal assumption is to start with a little "trust credit" and take it as it is — for now…

Good open source citizen, if you ask me.

If I want to fix a bug in an esoteric Scheme implementation OR a bug in a JDK or PHP I have to ask for permission even though it is on my own time. I already volunteer more time than I am paid to my employer, but I have to ask for permission for something they have literally no interest in.

This is bullshit.

That’s what a combination of salaried employment with pay and job duties qualifying for FLSA exemption is, in effect.

> Because they might try to take an investment, and the investor would say, “prove to me that you’re not going to get sued by some disgruntled ex-employee who claims to have invented the things that you’re selling.” The company wants to be able to pull out a list of all current and past employees, and show a contract from every single one of them assigning inventions to the company.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

Every company I've worked for has had it this way.

Never a company policy, just those few bad people giving it a bad name...

That approach does create more complications though. What if the employee claims that they weren't paid for the game idea and didn't present it to the company, rather that a coworker learned about it off hours and "stole" it[1]. Or if an employee writes some software entirely during off-hours, but incorporates the company's trade secrets or patent pending ideas into that software. To avoid this, the company now has to document that rights for each work was transferred from employee to employer, and it has to document what is and isn't considered a trade secret, so the employee knows what information they learned at work they are and aren't allowed to use in side projects. From the employer's perspective it is much easier and safer to make the default that all IP rights are assigned to employer, and then document any exceptions they might grant.

In other words ideas (patents, trade secrets) are much messier than works (copyright, physical objects) when it comes to employee / employer contract.

[1] Also "game idea" was a poor example because game concepts/rules are not covered by patents or copyright, just trade secrets prior to publishing, but I'll continue his example as if they were.

(Disclaimer: not a lawyer.)

In this case, the employee had been part of the team maintaining it at IBM in an official capacity... and then IBM apparently decided they did not want him to work with that team anymore. In turn, he changed the maintainers file to point to his personal email address, and the managers involved were predictably not amused.