Repo: https://github.com/lmanul/welltemperedtraveler
I have to assume that the submitted URL won't be around for long, given it looks like an unannounced and unmaintained pet project of somebody who is no longer at the company.
I have to assume that the submitted URL won't be around for long, given it looks like an unannounced and unmaintained pet project of somebody who is no longer at the company.
This seems to have been a year ago at most judging commits, so can't be something that's been there for ages.
So if it is true, then maybe any software engineer that writes some interesting web app trinket who works for Google could have this happen to them. I'm sure the coder who made the above app will show up in these comments in the next couple hours or so lol.
EDIT: Omg it's the cartoonist guy!
In every employment contract I've ever seen, IP assignment is right there in the dozen or so pages of the contract. It is far too critical to just hide it away in "some company rule book" that the contract references. The contract itself will spell it out in great detail.
Google's actually better than many though - there's a process to release your code under an open source license (although with Google's copyright), you can contribute patches to third party open source projects without additional permission (again, under Google's copyright), and you can request that Google assign copyright for a personal project back to you. My understanding is that Apple basically forbid all of this outright. I'm not sure what the situation is at Amazon or Netflix.
That the project owners couldn't change licence (and keep that code) without Google's consent? Is this why some (/all of a certain size or commerce) worry about CLAs?
That doesn't mean that they won't try to sue you though.
Thing is while many cases are easy to tell if they’re obviously in violation of policy, it’s still possible to sleepwalk into it:
Doing personal email in OWA/Gmail on a company laptop in lunch? OK
Doing personal email in desktop Outlook on a company laptop? OK (as was my understanding of policy at the time: there was a carve-out for having personal email on company hardware)
Doing personal email which involves a quick code-review of a rando’s PR to your personal github repo? hmmmm…
What about making slight modifications to that code?
What if you clone the repo because you need to get a bigger-picture?
What if you inadvertently start a build of your cloned repo?
Where is the line?
A caveat is that, in California, you own your project provided that (1) you didn't use any company resource, (2) you didn't do it on work hours, and (3) your project is not related to anything that the company does. Of course, in case of Google, it does pretty much everything, which means Google can easily claim anything you do as its own. (IANAL, don't quote me on this.)
Thankfully I haven't heard of many other cases of this getting people in too much trouble other than Serge Aleynikov and his case with GS (and honestly, it was stupid of him to upload even open source code from work computer to a remote server).
I worked at GS and it was the most locked down development environment ever, so it wouldn't even be feasible/productive for you to "accidentally" work on side projects on these machines. Most security/audit trainings were around "Really - if you do this, you will instantly be teleported into the center of the nearest neutron star"
IIRC, he saw some open source code used in Goldman Sachs, believed that they should be open (whether right or wrong, I don't know), and uploaded it public. Right? I remember HN discussion from years ago.
I don't think his story is related to developers' side projects. If you work for Company X and knowingly upload some of its internal repository to a public place, of course you're going to be fired. Would you expect anything else?
In any case, I just pulled up my GS NDA and I probably shouldn't comment any further.
Funny side note though: GS realtime risk/lazily loaded object graph database is called SecDB, and @saleyn has a repo on GitHub called secdb which has to do with having an efficient data store for financial data... I guess he was feeling invulnerable after getting off of the previous charges haha
It's overly broad so that if you have a dispute about something you did outside of work they don't have to prove shit in court to get you to stop.
I have lots of technical interests that aren't even remotely related to fintech, so I feel comfortable with these boundaries. Plus, at work I'm given a Windows machine, and all my personal projects -- and other commercial endeavors -- won't run on Windows. For that reason alone, I haven't requested alternative hardware/OS even though I could.
It’s just so in conflict with the creative process.
Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer’s line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise
(from California state law, but it could reasonably be directly in a contract from a reasonable employer)
Joel makes the case that if you work for Google, this is meaningless because what isn't related to Google? They do everything. This makes sense to me, and in Google's defense, they pay the part. But then Joel goes on to make the case that "related" is such a vague term that as an employee you can't safely depend on it, even if you work for a company with a narrower scope (ie nearly any other company).
I don't know, this seems pretty far fetched to me. Say, you work at SoundCloud and your side project is an iOS game. Wrote it on your own device, in your own time, and so on and so forth. That is so obviously not related that I have a very hard time seeing how, with a clause such as this, any potential judge or jury could decide otherwise. Let alone the reputation damage SoundCloud could get trying to lawyer up on this shit. It just makes no sense.
Therefore, I still feel it's a draconian piece of contract and that, unless you apply at a company that truly does everything or pays top dollar, it shouldn't be a reasonable expectation to sign stuff like that.
Especially in the rare case that the game becomes popular.
In reality, I think Google has an "open source committee" where you would show your proposed contribution, get approved, and then you can contribute to outside open source projects. I heard the process was fairly reasonable.
Most work for large corporations is done under a "work for hire" agreement which means the company owns the copyright to the source you write. Additionally, many big companies will pressure you to accept employment clauses that claim ownership of anything you create in your free time, 24/7. This is not just for code, it's also standard for contract employees in the TV and film industry.
Note I'm distinguishing here between "employee" and "freelancer". I refuse to sign work-for-hire agreements, which means when hired, I still own the copyright to the source. I grant the company hiring me free use and modification and in some cases, right to resell.
I had a case of a startup where I was the sole coder, who turned around and sold their app to [Fortune 100 company] who didn't realize that I still owned this source. This company then asked me to consult - offering half what I'd been paid to write it - and further, asked me to sign a contract stating that they owned the code and everything else I made while I was consulting with them. Oh and also, without my help, they were missing some major assets they needed to recompile it.
I told them where to stick it, so they hired a bunch of people to try to reverse engineer it rather than agreeing to my terms. That didn't work (not least because I had trapped the fuck out of the code they did have, in ways that made it crash the compiler) so they ended up down a couple million bucks and shuttering the site. If they had only been nice, and hadn't come at me with the aggressive attitude, it could've been a nice little asset.
If you do not sign a work-for-hire agreement, and you're an independent contractor - not an employee - you own the source code unless otherwise stated in a contract. Beware that some jurisdictions will view you as a de facto employee in some cases (for better or worse). And my advice to anyone listening is, never, ever sign a contract with one of these companies that stipulates that they own your off-time work product. It's completely abusive and unnecessary. It's not worth taking a job with such a company.
Bellum omnium contra omnes
Usually the developer gets taken advantage of because they assumed the world to be fair and equal and companies to have your best interest.
In this case the developer got wind of an attempt to take advantage of him. He put in protection to prevent this. That's what a company would do.
To not understanding why someone needed do that strikes me as a bit naive.
The people who sold the company intentionally misrepresented what they actually owned. They only owned the final compiled software they had purchased, and the right to use and repair or modify it. They didn't have a right to sell the source code, and I had no obligation to make it easy for the buyer to reverse engineer it.
Binary delivery seems like buying some cool-looking alien device that manufacturers widgets; you have no idea how it works or how to maintain it, so you just sell widgets hoping it keeps working without maintenance.
Of course, you could have gone the more expensive route and hired your own team of coders to write the whole thing from scratch, under whatever license you wanted, and then you would own the source. But if a company needs document software or meeting software in the cloud, how many pay to reinvent the wheel and roll their own?
Paranoia-driven engineering decisions like this are no good. If your customers are bottom-of-the-garbage-can customers, get better customers. If you can't find better customers, then perhaps you are right where you deserve to be, doing garbage work for lousy cheats, which you must booby trap to make sure you get paid. If that's where you are, fine, but I hope no one with a brighter future reads these kinds of comments and thinks that being a bottom feeder is the norm.
I should also clarify that this was a PHP backend that was handed over freely, and a public-facing Flash app that was handed over as an SWF. At heart it was a highly specialized video / social platform. Graphics assets were handed over. What was not handed over were the front-end AS3 scripts; and I used a few hex editing methods and other ways to trap the compiled bytecode that would crash all known SWF decompilers. I also had it phone home if someone tried to decompile it. (All those decompilers would start by importing the SWF onto the root object of another SWF; root detects a higher parent; kaboom).
What those guys did, and what the other company tried to do to me, was unethical. I didn't even have the right to sell them exclusive use of some of that source, because it was already deployed in other commercial projects. I didn't have the right to sell it out from under the other companies who already had paid for use of it. My refusal to sign [Fortune 500 company's] contract was on their behalf as well as my own. That company wouldn't listen to reason, so I left them a working binary and said "good luck", and then watched it keep phoning home until they gave up trying to decompile it.
Also, I've never prevented an honest customer from accessing source code they needed, and in this case I was willing to negotiate a non-exclusive use of the source code with the new company, for a fair price. But they refused that. They demanded sole ownership for $0, and they wanted to pay me half my rate for consulting. Not to mention they themselves are one of the most blatantly unethical companies in the world. I didn't feel like I owed them anything.
The company did go bust, and only then did I open it up as a paid service. I ran it as a side project, but got a steady profit from it. Closed it when I retired.
Software Engineer.
You just need to pass code review to make such a change - convincing people reviewing it would be the tricky part but not impossible. You could brand it a "20% project" or something.
http://google.com/googledance2004 http://google.com/moon http://google.com/googlegulp http://google.com/heart
"No results."
I'm told that that's because who knows how that site works is still with the company.
So Google blocks it’s own content from being indexed?
He certainly had a free reign at Google.
"Org charts" comic by Manu Cornet
I never realized it the org charts was created by the same dude.
I was expecting the top temperature legend to let you filter locations by temperature, but that's not the case.