Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

To add an anecdote: on my last job search I got offers from two different but very similar companies (both around ~200 people).

I got one first, read through the contract, saw the standard clause about owning your whole life. I told them it was a deal-breaker if we couldn't get it changed. I got the standard response "oh we never act on that, lots of people here have side-projects", etc. I told them if that was the policy, it needed to be in writing. They escalated internally, talked with legal, etc, but the decision-makers ultimately wouldn't budge. I walked away, and told them in very plain terms that their legal department was responsible for how things turned out.

Shortly afterward I started the process with the second company. Got to the end, saw the clause, told them it was a deal-breaker. Discussed it on multiple calls with different people, eventually the CTO himself who was still reluctant to change it but was sympathetic. Eventually they were able to come back with a contract where that entire section was cut out. I took the offer and it's been a great job so far.

I guess what I'm saying is: hold out. Make a stink about these draconian contracts, and you'll eventually get through and find someone willing to be reasonable. Who knows, if enough people draw a line in the sand maybe it'll become a big enough roadblock that they'll stop putting it in the "standard" contracts.

I had a similar situation with my current job, but with a happy ending. The contract was "standard" but others who also read it thoroughly had the same issue with broad, overreaching clauses that essentially attempt to claim complete IP ownership of everything the employee ever touched. The directors were very reasonable and understood my concerns, we eventually managed to remove or reword all of the offending parts.

The origins of these clauses appeared to be entirely from third party lawyers, probably derived from some boilerplate contract. I presume their priority is to maximise legal "protection" for the company at all cost... even if it drives employees away, so it's not necessarily something the company explicitly asked for. Whether or not you are able to push back against them probably has more to do with the company culture and whether the leaders or hiring managers are sympathetic to developers and how the FOSS world really works.

I think this is probably true for most small companies, that it's incidental and intended for protection... but obviously in this case Bumble seem to actively be exploiting these clauses for gain rather than protection.

Have to add my own anecdote to yours because this type of shifty behaviour is apparently common.

I was not hired as a developer, more like devops. But I ended up creating a lot of code. And through sheer principle I did it all open source. Created public repos of everything and then private branches for our internal Git.

Fast forward 7-8 years and we're using our parent orgs system to manage salary, vacation and stuff like that.

My manager wants me to approve something in this new system so I login and I'm greeted with a new employee contract.

The system says I have to sign this to proceed, and in this country we have digital identities so signing it would be as simple as taking out my mobile phone, starting an eID app, challenge, response, code, voilá signed.

Luckily I became very suspicious, downloaded the PDF version instead of signing it. Read it carefully, showed friends who are in the business.

Turns out it was the exact same clause, everything I create, on or off hours, belongs to parent org.

I simply refused to sign it and since I was already hired from a previous contract they removed the requirement from the system so I could proceed.

Now I believe this was a simple case of Hanlon's razor, but damn it would have caught a lot of less vigilant people.

And to be fair, I have nothing against keeping certain code private. If my employer tells me that a project cannot be open source then I will comply. But by default anything I write is open source unless anyone requests otherwise, or I consider it a bad idea due to some reason that is usually about security.

This is something I dislike about the rise of DocuSign contracts: with paper, I can cross out clauses before signing and then the ball is in the other party’s court to decide if the result is acceptable. DocuSign makes this sort of flexibility much more difficult and is an implicit bias towards the employer’s side of negotiations.

However, in CA at least, these clauses are limited by law and, as long as your employer doesn’t work on everything, employees have fairly broad protections for side projects that don’t compete with their employer.

My experience from the other side of the fence is that this is pretty standard, i.e. nobody would really bother with changing the standard contract for one potential employee unless they were perceived as a crucial asset. The people who do the hiring, the ones who make the decisions and the ones who will work with you later - these are very different groups of people, with some (very temporary) overlap. The hiring ones, just like most people, prefer to avoid unnecessary problems and additional paperwork, and move on.

Mind you, if many people have the same attitude as you, the hiring people may actually make the change happen forcing the people in charge to approve a variant of the contract without that clause and offer it to the ones who complain but are otherwise excellent candidates. But this is not a quick and easy process.

In Dutch law it's actually by default the case that your employee can claim the ip of your work, if you want to prevent it you need to put the clause in, most people are not aware. Very disturbing.

It makes me wonder if there’s a way to put together a standard rider that overrides those clauses. Then it just becomes an exchange of paper to sign.

I once took a job and on my first day they gave me an employment contract, one clause of which stated that I would grant the company rights to use my name, voice, and likeness "for marketing purposes".

I said hell to the no. I was prepared to walk out rather than sign that.

Thankfully they drew up another contract om the spot with that bit removed. Not so thankfully, they dropped me before I could actually prove myself (about 3 weeks) so I might've pissed someone off.

I was once presented with such a contract; After returning them a redacted version of the contract with all the offending clauses and pointing out that it was both abusive and unenforceable (as I was working from a country where these clauses, while not completely uncommon, aren't legal), they still insisted. I did them a counter-offer; I calculated how much money it would cost them to own everything I would produce or think of during the contract, and even told them I would carry a recorder to record every dumb idea, plus a bag to collect all the poop, so they could have all their precious IP. It was a fun discussion.

This reminded me of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25281438

It’s much easier when you can resist in numbers. I worked at a company that tried to get existing employees to sign a new contract like this abs we were all like naw. After multiple meetings and negotiations they scrapped it and narrowed it down to certain high level employees and sales.

Most tech companies in the US require for their employees to give their IP rights away. Apple has been known in to do this, but I remember reading about a Apple employee releasing a app he made under his S.O's account to bypass his agreement.

That “it’s standard wording” phrase is very … standard.

This is why you keep your off work hours.. work not related to your name or identity.

you wont get on hours removed - think about it

This is such a hilariously way to shoot yourself in the foot. Software engineers that work on open source in their free time are almost always extremely talented, and will definitely look at this news and never consider joining this company. Bumble just got added to the same list as Amazon of companies I will just simply not even apply to when searching for a job.

edit: looks like there is more to this story than the tweets are suggesting. If this wasn't obvious, don't build projects that are derived from work you are being paid to do and don't do them on the company laptop.

> but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty

After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. It says so in the README.md. They were also written while the author was employed by Badoo/Bumble.

I don't think this is as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments would suggest.

Same. I fully blacklist working for companies that do this.

Same. They'll never hire good coders this way.

Open source means the code is available it doesn’t mean you have the license to use it and that is dependent on the license

Your stance is basically akin to viewing source of a paid javascript template site and taking all the js because its all in plain text

It seems like at a certain level, when a company achieves an unfortunate combination of buttloads of money and incompetent leadership, that company starts to think that it is above puny human concepts like reputation. Compare it with the behaviour of A Certain Database Company, Whose Name Is Similar To “Oral Care”.

If the company owns it, the the (gpl or whatever) licensing was not legal, so the core devs cannot 'fork it', since that would be illegal. They can rewrite the project from scratch though.

I don't know how copyright laws work in Russia, but it's a bit of a gray area in America when you write code for someone unless it's explicitly spelled out in the contract. The end product (compiled binary or whatever they're paying for to "just work") belongs to them, but the source code does not belong to them unless it's explicitly stated in a work-for-hire contract that all of your intellectual property goes to them while you're hired. I always make it clear in my contracts that I am not re-selling rights to anything I build that's derived from FOSS or, even my own code if it's part of my own open source projects; the client cannot own something that is not for sale, just by hiring me on an hourly basis. I make sure to communicate that with them verbally as well beforehand, in case they mistakenly have the idea that they are buying the rights to something that I can't legally sell them. Usually I present them a list of modules and files that will be used in their project which (a) are FOSS, (b) belong to me, and (c) which I will write for them that they can reuse/rewrite/resell the source code for.

The story gets more interesting if you consider that Bumble is also developing two libraries under their official name, badoo/MVICore and badoo/RIBs, which are conceptually the same as MVIKotlin and Decompose respectively.

What do you do, if a framework/library is effectively a rewrite of something developed by another team at the same company, but also released officially under the brand of same company?

But in this case, while the image is "Arkadii Ivanov created MVIKotlin/Decompose while working at Badoo/Bumble"...

The full story is that Badoo/Bumble had already been working on badoo/MVICore and badoo/RIBs, with other employees working on those products full-time.

Isn't it so that if the employee published the code under lets say gpl license but the company acquired the rights, the company can reserve the rights and the code cannot be forked

> I worked for a company once that had this sort of "we own everything" IP clause.

To clarify: Bumble doesn't appear to be going after everything this developer produced while working for them.

They're claiming ownership of only two specific repos, both of which even mention that they were "inspired by" Badoo/Bumble open-source projects. These two repos were developed while the developer was working for Badoo/Bumble and I assume are directly related to the type of work the developer was doing for hire.

Obviously we don't have all the details, but from what I'm seeing it seems Badoo/Bumble may actually have a strong case for these repos being their property, even without weird IP assignment clauses.

If either tool was used or contributed to while developing the Bumble app, it's basically no question that they have rights to it. On the other hand, if the author somehow never, ever used them as part of his dayjob and never, ever worked on them as part of his work for Bumble, the claims would be questionable.

I also worked for a company with an objectionable IP clause, and because of their general state of disorganisation I didn't actually receive a copy of the contract until after I had been working there for a few weeks.

While discussing my options with friends and colleagues, I was given the ridiculous advice that I was already bound by the contract just by showing up and that signing it wouldn't make a difference.

Fortunately I disregarded that advice and asked for the clause to be renegotiated, which delayed things by another week, and I received advice (from someone more knowledgeable) that as I'd then worked there for a month, there was an implicit contract, but it bound the company, not me, meaning that I couldn't be fired without cause, which put me in a stronger negotiating position.

Anyway, they ended up accepting a rewording of the clause which meant that only work I produced (in or out of hours) which was relevant to the business could be claimed by them.

I once had a company demand I sign a non-compete after I'd handed in my notice.

I honestly don't understand what kind of thought process goes into this. In my case it was pure bridge burning and I have no idea why they thought they could pull it off. They even tried to claim they had the full backing of their legal team despite none of the legal team being present in the meeting.

you really should check with an attorney. to me this doesn't pass the sniff test.

i work for an open source (AGPL) company, that uses one of my open source (MIT) projects as a core dependency. before i joined, i made sure that any code i write for my library continues to be MIT-licensed, no matter when and where i am writing it. additional code i write for the company also often starts out as a demo/PoC in my MIT repo, but is then adapted and extended into our AGPL codebase.

this, however, is likely a different arrangement than what you're describing as a loophole.

It depends on the exact wording of your employment contract.

If it only covers work you did with company property, you're lucky.

As far as the law goes, in California (per Labor Code section 2870), employment agreements are allowed to assign the employer IP rights (including copyrights and patent rights) to inventions that satisfy any of the following:

- "[Use] the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information"

- "Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer"

- "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"

For my part, the employment contract I signed is maximalist: it basically paraphrases the above language and says that anything satisfying any of those conditions is assigned to my employer.

The third condition is really the kicker. If you want to use your code at work, then the code probably "relates to" your employer's "business" or "actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development". If your employment contract is as maximalist as mine (and there's a good chance it is), then that's enough to make it not yours, regardless of who (if anyone) forked it.

In my case, my employer is large enough that it's hard to imagine software that doesn't somehow relate to its business…

Your example is foolproof, but there's always a bigger fool? How do you prove that your commits weren't made on company time? How do you prove that they weren't made on company laptops? How do you prove that you didn't include trade-secrets in your implementation of these libraries?

You can show that your commits were made at hours outside of office hours, you can show that the commits were made with your personal e-mail address, but lawyers can dispute it - Git commits are cryptographic proof only that someone (or if you signed them, someone with access to that private key) attested to those statements, and you do both those things on the company computers. You can show that all of the code is obvious, but lawyers can dispute it. A sufficiently foolish lawyer can dispute literally anything.

Don't work for places where you'd have a problem with this - Get explicit approval for you to spend company time working on open source libraries that are the proprietary interest of the company, but that you as an individual have a copyleft license to (Iff you don't care that you can't take them private later). Or work for a company that doesn't have such onerous terms in their employment contract.

That sounds like the standard employment contract; not necessarily the "shower clause."

It makes sense that the employer (or contractee) can claim that all work, done on their paid time, or on their equipment, is theirs.

i.e., if I use my employers' laptop to develop OS software, and they can prove it, then they have a strong (and, basically, legit) claim on my work. Same with time that I'm being paid for, and supposed to be doing work for them.

That's one reason why I brought my own personal laptop, many years ago, instead of using my employers' computer for my personal stuff.

I'm not sure, but it may not even be required to be in the employment contract. I think that basic employment laws may enforce that.

The "shower clause," on the other hand, says that all work and ideas that occur during your term of employment, belong to the company; regardless of whether or not it occurred on their paid time, or using their equipment.

i.e., if you come up with an idea for a great Web site, while out on a date, or while taking a shower; whether or not it has anything to do with the corporation, the corporation can lay claim to it.

It's pretty damn evil.

IANAL, cannot comment on the legality, but as far as I’m concerned the comment about the department being too dependent on you is the most salient point of your entire post. There’s a whole universe of lawsuits and actions that can be filed and are not filed because companies calculate that they’ll extract a better return from a “live and let live” approach.

There’s probably an ocean of open source that is in a work product gray area, and the companies just don’t care enough to do anything (think “I saw Alex working on a 2D physics game library after successfully deploying our latest healthcare platform feature. It will be of no use to us, and Alex is a good dev, let’s let it slide.”)

A lot of copyright infringement goes un-acted on because it just doesn’t matter to the rights holders. But if they’re in a jurisdiction where they can enforce their work product agreement and then management changes, a new greedier manager might decide to claim Alex’s 2D physics engine on the almost-zero chance it becomes useful to them in the future. Probably not the smartest move, possibly a totally legal move. (But what do I know, IANAL)

Personally I don't use the comp laptop for my own stuff. I remote into my machine/network at home from my personal phone. DP over usb-c works wonders with a BT keyboard.

As a side note: I don't publish anything. My wife on the other hand does. It's been like that for over 10 years now.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I ended up doing this after a previous employer wanted to grab a load of VBA modules. Big pain the back side. My luck was that my wife actually did work with me on them. Saved my back side big time.

... Yeah I don't understand this at all, and I'm not going to try. Ever since my employer's started putting in that IP clause I stopped writing public/open-source code.

This

Can you share what state law provides this protection?

I read an apocryphal story about a guy whose manager saw him leaving and coming back during the workday, and asked later why he didn’t clock out and back in.

“I was getting a haircut,” the man said.

“That’s not part of your job duties here, you cannot do that on the company’s time,” replied the manager.

“Why not?” said the man. “I grew most of it on the company’s time.”

> I've always thought that if a company claims rights over what you do outside worktime

A lot of people are assuming this was done separate from his job, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Badoo/Bumble isn't trying to claim ownership of other projects he did, just the ones that were closely related to his Badoo/Bumble work during his employment.

Just a note - in all places I've worked (BigCo's) they take a zero-tolerance approach to modifying the contract. It is their way or the highway. I guess they can afford to just say no and pass on you, rather than have loads of employees with their own unique snowflake contracts. Perhaps smaller companies are less strict, but IME big ones take zero shit in this regard.

Good luck.

You should absolutely continue this pursuit, but keep in mind that the biggest things you can do to avoid a legal dispute are to clearly communicate expectations and not work with assholes. A well-written contract is like a solid deadbolt on your front door: it’ll make reasonable people think twice, but a determined attacker will just smash a window and go through it (or, to explicate the metaphor, sue you anyway knowing the legal process itself is sufficiently painful to wear you down even if they don’t have a case).

Search for 'california assignment of inventions' as well as 'california assignment of inventions template'. The first hit for the latter is currently

https://launchtothrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Thrive...

which has a great exhibit B you can attach. Reword it to reference the CA statute but to be clear that it shall apply to you regardless of residence in CA.

You need to get something that explicitly says what you want; if you want the freedom to work on one particular open source project then get them to give you that clause; but also thinkw hether you want it more general; It's very difficult because my understanding is you can't even do drive-by fixes in random projects without an OK.

Usually the clause where they claim ownership needs to have the phrase "Related to the business", or "During work hours with company equipment". If it tries to claim all IP during the course of the employment, redline it and hand it back

Copyright is automatically the employer's in the UK: the term is "in the course of employment", and no contractual language is required. The employer is effectively the author.

What that term means is a matter of case law, and is different if you are contracted / self-employed. Typically it is interpreted in a pro-employer manner, and if you are employed to write code then then assume that all the code you write is your employer's.

Talk to a work contract specialized lawyer. Even apart from this issue, there might be other issues in the contract, so why not alway talk to one before signing.

When I got my first programming job in Canada I've already had active product. I have informed them about it and I've also asked them to agree that whatever I am working on in my private time is my property as long as it is not in direct competition and / or not based on employer's code. They did not mind at all.

This kind of thing is totally unenforceable in the UK. The corollary of clauses about side projects is that you are unable to work anywhere else whilst you are employed at the company, again totally unenforceable in the UK (the case law against restraint of trade goes back to the 17th century in the UK).

The only exception to this is if the work you are doing outside the contract conflicts/overlaps with the work you are doing within the contract. In that case, if the employer inserted a restraint of trade clause into the contract, that would be enforceable (that is a standard non-compete, which is perfectly legal and sensible).

It is all total nonsense though. UK employers, and lawyers, are a bit mad about this kind of thing. They will insist on things like probationary periods or working "at will" for a period of time...and then they will demand that you yield 24 hours of your time whether awake or asleep to them...whilst they pay you for 7 hours. It is what happens when underemployment is high.

Believe it or not, this actually works: bring your attorney with you to the interview, and accept no interview less than product lead. Basically, it's an arms race currently using guns, and the majority of the dumb ass developers show up with knives.

so? it's apache licensed, so that doesn't really change anything

An interesting related question I've always had is what even counts as a contribution. For example, consider the three situations:

(a) I open an issue about a feature not working. E.g.: “When I press the button, the app crashes”.

(b) Same as (a), but I also point out the place in the code where the error is without providing any code to fix it. E.g. “When I press the button, the app crashes, and I think that it has to do with a null pointer dereference in function pkg.foo()”.

(c) Same as (b), but I also provide a simple diff to fix it, but not a formally submitted merge/pull request.

The (c) sounds close enough to a contribution but not quite. And I'm not sure about (a) and (b).

If Bumble really wants to cause grief I guess they could file a DMCA takedown request with GitHub once they have secured ownership of the copyright, the argument being they never licensed or released the code themselves.

the account is fair game as company property as it is being used that way, so I'd always want a paper trail in either direction

ex: the White House account on Twitter is not the property of some social media manager but US Gov

we do a lot of OSS and are careful each time about upstream vs fork vs from scratch.. i think key parts of the Bumble story aren't being said because I'm struggling to imagine a modern eng culture where this would happen , and the author's repo seems savvy.

Github repo is not the original repository either. It's usually just a mirror of the developer's repository, which is the original one.

> transfer your likes to us

Yikes! Not likes!

Mob just became too brazen. Allowing employees to work on their own stuff while [ab]using company's dough was a company's good will and great trust. That employee should go back to normal and work for company during paid hours.

Read the contract before you sign it. Don't work for companies that include any clauses what you can or cannot do in your free time (excluding reasonable exceptions, such as not directly competing with $employer).

This sort of greed/zealotry on the side of employers is why some FOSS projects are such a pain to contribute to (i.e. anything that's part of the Eclipse Foundation). You pretty much have to sign your name in blood on a contributor agreement, and you may even have to get your employer to sign it too. This is madness. Slavery is not a thing. Employers do not own us.

Should your work in spare time be explicitly exempt in the contract, or, if side projects are not mentioned in the contract, does that implicitly exempt it?

> Some employers make the excuse that it's only during office hours; others claim that this clause would "never actually be used".

If these things were true, then the employer would be perfectly fine with modifying the employment contract accordingly.

If the copyright has always belonged to the employer then OP never had the legal ability to license it as open source in the first place. The employer could presumably shut the whole project down and in theory even go after others for copyright infringement retrospectively.

If there have been other contributors then the employer would not magically get the copyright to those contributions though, which could leave the whole project in limbo with no-one having enough rights to continue working on it and releasing the results.

They want the official repo.

If Uber came up with it, and Badoo forked it, does it imply Uber could one day sue to own a % of Badoo/Bumble?

Doesn’t that open up a chance of lawsuits with all your other employers?

Such an anonymous mode would be damaging for GitHub because it needs to stay friendly with its commercial and corporate customers. Besides, such a mode only provides obfuscation, but no legal protection at all. In fact, lawyers would turn it around and claim that using that mode showed that the owner of a repo was aware that what they were doing was wrong.

Your idea would have a better chance of success as a separate platform dedicated to anonymous code hosting. But that in turn would likely attract bad actors, as usual.

UK law is pretty clear: if you are a contractor then you own everything you create, but if you are a salaried employee (”work for hire”) then your employer owns everything you create that’s related to the business.

If you write Perl for a bank they don’t own the songs you compose in the shower (they afe outside the ”scope of employment”.)

They probably own your money manager side project though. “Probably” here means, as always, “has a good chance of winning at tribunal” rather than any defensible logical meaning.

Why do you believe that? There is specific wording that is customary to use in an employment contract in at least England and Wales (along the lines of "work done in the course of your employment") if that sort of agreement is intended. It would typically cover work done on employer time, using the employer's resources, or in a field related to working for the employer, and you have to be careful about how broadly the latter can be interpreted in the context of the rest of the contract.

It is also sadly not unusual for employers to seek IP rights to all creative work done by a salaried employee during their term of employment as an explicit provision of the employment contract. Most of us here might consider that abusive but it might remove ambiguity and put the employer on safer ground legally in the event of a later dispute, and lawyers gonna lawyer.

I have argued before that an employee should reject that kind of excessively broad term and if working in a creative industry like software development they should seriously consider whether they really want to work for that employer if the employer is unwilling to change to the more customary contractual agreement when it is challenged. But a lot of people just sign contracts without reading them and unfortunately OP may be in trouble here if that is what they did.

If the employment contract contains no IP clauses that make the agreement explicit then maybe the course of employment rule would be the default but this would be very unlikely for anyone working in a creative industry and OP's description suggests there is specific wording being cited in this case.

I am not a lawyer. The understanding above does come from discussing this issue with real lawyers in England more than once, but not since a few years ago. As always, get your legal advice from a real lawyer if it matters and not from some random HN comment.

Even if your open source work is based on your employer's IP?

This one I’d happily sign. They reserve the right to buy, in worst case one gets compensated.

I would guess their position would be that they owned the code/copyright from the very outset, and didn't approve applying the APL to it. The license they want to use might be one that forbids posting the source code.

The rationale is that what other people here are saying - that Bumble (Badoo) should have paid them on company time to contribute to open-source - was already happening.

Bumble owns under the Badoo repository two projects, called badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs. These libraries are developed on company time by employees, as open-source.

If you check MVIKotlin and Decompose, you'll see that they're conceptually equivalent. You could therefore argue it is, in fact, using company resources.

But badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs are the two official frameworks written and released by Badoo. Then, what is MVIKotlin and Decompose, and does Badoo own the rights to it - if it was developed on company time, based on pre-existing source code owned by the company?

It will be something that we might never know

Maybe juste to spite a leaving employee.

Sounds like a tricky situation with respect to the visa. In my experience, it is pretty common for universities to operate in this way.

The default position from legal teams ( uni or corporate) will always be to own everything.

JFYI: Bumble and Badoo are the same company.

Despite what my contract says, if my employer asks for my personal projects, I'm quitting the same minute and we can work out the remaining details over email. I guess if they push and threaten enough I will eventually hand over the code.

But in such a scenario, I'm not a loser. If I'm capable of writing software that my former company cares that much about, I'm winning. I'll hand over my Haskell code, laugh at the thought of them trying to understand it, purge all copies I posses, and immediately begin rewriting it in another language and under another anonymous profile.

Unfortunately I can see requesting a blank contract early on in the hiring process being a huge turn off. Maybe even at any point.

The thing about companies past a fairly small size is that you cannot reason about them as a group with characteristics much beyond sharing an employer. Are they good people? Yes. Are they bad people? Yes. Are they vindictive, legalistic people? Yes.

With this in mind, I would say that the cake shows that some part of the org is good people. We might consider being careful about how quickly and how aggressively we generalize this. I know where I've been in companies where parts of engineering were good people while other parts of the company had wonderful and bountiful opportunities to become good people.

They're just fans of portal.