edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.
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.
My point is that this is petty rather than if they can legally do this. They didn't ask for the repos to be taken down, and the projects the repos are inspired by are open source already by Baboo from what I can tell. I've found that companies which are petty about one thing will be petty about other things so are not good places to work.
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.
Which Baboo has released under an Apache 2 license from what I can tell. Your comment makes it sound like they were proprietary libraries.
You can't develop something "inspired by" your day job, while working the day job in parallel, and then claim it isn't related to the day job.
And even if it is allowed, can your employer claim ownership on the basis that your work is derived from employer/company work.
However, I think this is unprecedented (I can't think of any similar cases regarding reclamation of IP), and we'd have to be actual lawyers to know the answer. I'm curious to see where this case will go.
That is how Open Source is supposed to work, I don't understand why everyone is thinking that this is some kind of huge discovery. Since both the MVICore and MVIKotlin repos are Apache 2.0, Badoo could simply pull in any improvements from MVIKotlin in if they wanted. They could ask their ex-employee if there was any interest in Badoo officially maintaining the project.
There are about ten other paths I could suggest that go with how OSS projects can and should work. None of them involve sending legal notices to your former employees to "transfer" the repos.
All I'm seeing here is that some person at Badoo/Bumble with little knowledge of how OSS works and a lot of lawyer time to throw around has made this move, and lost them a lot of goodwill from potential future employees.
i dont know if you can claim this - OSS is not supposed to be unsanctioned derivative works of commercial software that is private. The company _could_ make it OSS, but an employee cannot, since they do not actually own the rights to make this decision.
Perhaps Bumble was a bit heavy handed, but from the point of view of the law, they are acting within their rights to demand ownership transfer, or removal etc.
Commercial and OSS are orthogonal.
> ... that is private
It seems to have been released under Apache 2.0: https://github.com/badoo/MVICore/blob/master/LICENSE
> The company _could_ make it OSS
They _did_
I wonder what the implications are, and what else there will be to know on this case later.
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
I am asking exclusively about the legal circumstance
And also stop acting confused at every response, this is a normal conversation where someone asks about the context and the other person replies with the answer, I skimmed the tweet thread but the background isn't familiar to me and thats what the point of the conversation is
You are too tuned to expecting an adversarial comment to defend, when thats not the case at all
Trying to twist out of statements you made yourself and trying to play the victim when not winning an argument doesn't make for a useful conversation.
Is there any ambiguity in the case?
No, that's not what the term means. This has cropped up several times before on HN: