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3 pointsmfbx9da47 comments

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The company paid you to do that work, it's their's.

It sucks but that's the cost of a salary. You shouldn't give up though, in your 1x1s, and reviews keep pushing for it and specifically aske what you'd need to do as a next step.

I should add that I've never had a company deny me from open sourcing some generic library on the company's public account except for once when the boss was just clueless about how open sourcing something worked, and what license made sense and they were too busy to think about it. That's likely what it boils down to if I were to guess.

Yeah, I kind of need to hear this answer to be honest because it makes me feel less bad.

Is the company large enough to have an open source policy? I used to work for a company that had policies for both using open source in products as well as contributing to the community. Open source wasn't fundamental to the culture of the core products however. So actually getting approval was not particularly straightforward e.g. significant interaction with lawyers could be required. In a couple cases, to our detriment, we didn't follow through on contributions. But because there was a policy, it never felt unfair.

There seems to be a lot missing here. What was the "legal flex" that your boss did? And why would you be at risk of some "legal issue" for disclosing this discussion?

The legal flex is that contractually all work during work times is the company's IP. While the library I built has helped our company it isn't our product and it isn't my job. What I do for a salary is build our product not build this library. On a human moral level I would personally give my subordinate the right to open source the library because it was purely his creation.

As for what I could be subject to, could this be considered discussing publicly private company information?

Boeing sells airplanes. But they also make countless thousands of highly customized tools, physical and virtual, to help build that product and get it out the door. Almost none of them ship with the planes. But every single one of them belongs to Boeing and not you, Airbus, or anyone else.

I'd take a breather on this and get some perspective. Your boss is acknowledging that the work is useful and that's a start. Just relax.

I'm curious what your rush is to get it public other than it being "neat".

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