You can't really do this. Depends on your employment contract but code you write for an employer is usually copyright to them
... My first reaction was to publish the code on Github ...
You can't really do that either.
If I take that code and make a billion dollar business out of it, Box or Uber could then claim a share of it. That's the kind of things that companies do with the lawyers on retainer.
I then sue you for falsely claiming that you own it. You are particularly fucked because, thanks to this thread, you can't claim that you didn't know.
Even in California the "I wrote it on my own time" doesn't apply to software that relates to an employer's core business. In other places, like Washington State, you could be employed to write TPS reports and write a video game at home, and your employer would own that too.
IANAL but I have paid for advice on this very topic. I suggest you pay one too.
In other words, you can write generally useful components and utilities on your own time, network, and equipment; license them to your employer if everyone agrees; and either way you still own them. You just can’t write something directly related to or competitive with the products or processes that make your employer money.
The spreadsheet formulae and enhancements the author wrote during work hours at Uber, though, no. But even just their direct boss as an agent of their employer saying it’s ok to throw it on GitHub would probably cut them loose, especially since it’d be a derivative work with joint ownership.
All IMO of course, but that’s how I would have seen it in their shoes.
That was the intent, but not what actually happened.
Is intent to donate code enough to put it within your employment contract, when it's done outside work hours and would otherwise be outside the scope of employment?
The intent is a fact of what actually happened: which appears to be that it was written by an employee within the scope of employment to solve a business problem. Possibly outside of usual working hours, but if it’s by a salaried employee where doing work at home outside of usual working hours is itself a normal if not consistent part of employment, is probably not particularly significant.
That the employer later chose not to make use of it doesn’t change the circumstances of its creation; businesses often choose to not pursue use of exploratory work done by employees in the course of employment, that doesn’t surrender ownership of the work product.
And the version that was further developed within and in response to Uber business needs and actively used at Uber before the function for which it was used was terminated is an even clearer case (insofar as it is a distinct work from the original) of work-product (that it quite likely is also an unlicensed derivative work by Uber of proprietary Box code doesn’t mitigate that, though it puts Uber in the position of potentially being both a beneficiary and victim of IP violations.)
An imagined business problem.
If the code wasn't relevant to their actual business practices, that's quite relevant. They not only didn't want that code, they didn't want anything like it.
As for the modifications for Uber, that's not what I'm here to contest.
There are a massive number of examples of patent and copyright litigation stemming from work done for one employer, who rejected it, then the employee goes off and founds their own company and gets successfully sued.
Fairchild was unique in that they had claim to the IP that their employees wanted to use in new startups, yet they decided not to follow through and allowed the employees to start their own companies. They could’ve prosecuted but didn’t, and as a result we got Silicon Valley and the culture that surrounds it.
But it’s no guarantee that that your employer won’t pursue a copyright claim they are perfectly within their rights to do. Don’t assume your employer is Fairchild.
From a practical perspective, even if you think they don't own it, do you have the money to argue that in court if they decide that they do?
IANAL. If you are having issues like this, get legal advice from a lawyer. Not HN.
Relatedness is relative but I'd argue against it here. They didn't have functionality like that, and they didn't want it.
> The fact that he "intended to donate it" demonstrates that it was related to the company's business.
...yes, that's my point. We're using that intent to make the decision that it's covered. That doesn't seem like a good way to decide whether it's covered.
If he just made a web spreadsheet and did nothing else, people would shrug.
This is a leap
I’m nearly 100% certain we can look back at this comment in 20 years and find that absolutely nothing happened.
I am also nearly 100% certain we can look back at this comment in 20 years and find nothing happened, but only because nobody will take this code and make a billion dollar business. If they did, I guarantee there would be a law suit.
That’s just factually false. You specifically wrote:
> Even in California the "I wrote it on my own time" doesn't apply to software that relates to an employer's ***core*** business.
You can’t complain about people being “wishful” or in “denial” when they are quoting you.
Maybe California law is silent in the topic, but Aeolus wasn’t the person who introduced that specific phrase.
Getting a judgement against an individual is vanishingly unlikely to result in any profits.
https://unicourt.com/case/pc-db5-better-holdco-inc-et-al-v-d...
How did we get to this point as an industry and how do we change this destopia?
enjoyed the article, the bit about Excel circular ref linear regression was wild
Thanks for sharing a cool story.
I would have a hard time sleeping... like this would be like being in IT and knowing the backups were bullshit.
The later derivative that was actively used by and updated for the requirements of another employer during the coarse of work seems to more clearly their property as a derivative (but also murky because it is potentially an illegal derivative of the earlier work, if that was owned by the earlier employer.)
But even if you are unconvinced of that, work was clearly done on it on company time at Uber, where it was deployed as part of Uber China's business infrastructure. That work is absolutely owned by Uber (with maybe also some claim by Box). Not owned by OP.
The employment agreement can give up this right for things not related to the company's core business, and I usually insist on that in my agreements. But that is not the default behavior.
Work for hire should always be very clear.
We are like ants to them, they can squash us at any time, but most of the time we are too small to worry about.
Misses the point, which is: the likelihood of being sued increases when you break contracts or appear to do so
It's funny there's this idea that a company _might_ be potentially injured over code they do not want or know they had being made open source by its actual author, even though many of those companies will gladly use open-source tooling without ever contributing anything back.
Perhaps more soundly, though, in California – where Uber is headquartered – IP/Copyright for code is a huge legal question that the state and federal Supreme Court has no clear answer to. Sure, you obviously can't secretly clone Uber's entire stack, slap a new company logo on it, and start up as a competitor. But if you, as an author, wrote some code for a company under an IP agreement, then no-longer worked at said company, and then later adapted and expanded upon that code (or even started over, with the knowledge of what you learned from others' work): are you, at the originator, not legally allowed to be inspired by your past work? That's not something you, me, or even the company could decide.
> and then later adapted and expanded upon that code (or even started over, with the knowledge of what you learned from others' work)
These are extremely different scenarios. Starting with a copyrighted material and modifying it is not at all the same as reading material and starting over. The first is violating copyright, the second is a derivative work.
If I read everything correctly, what you describe doing is taking code owned by the first company and modifying it for the second company. That’s not at all a gray area. It’s a copyright violation. You the engineer sign away your rights to the code when you built it for company 1 while employed by them. Their employment contract for-sure states they own any work produced by you during your employment, and you agreed to this.
If the first project was done off of company time, posted publicly on a private account, you might have a claim to the rights.
I know you’ve dug your trench too deeply to change your mind at this point, but anyone reading your comments should know what you did was technically illegal and can get people in legal hot water.
> Their employment contract for-sure states they own any work produced by you during your employment, and you agreed to this.
There are many open legal questions as to where this line is drawn. Surely the line falls somewhere between "every character I've ever typed on a keyboard" and "the verbatim code". I personally don't think he's crossed it. IP ownership is much more complex than portrayed in HBO's Silicon Valley. That is my opinion.
Furthermore, when I worked at GitHub (now acquired by Microsoft, so I'm sure things have changed drastically) -- there were very lax IP ownership agreements in the employment contracts around code ownership, because the legal department was worried that if found in any way conflicting with California law it would render the entire IP claims null and void (which does have precedent in California).
The point is we don't know, and I think OP would know better than us if it was disallowed or not.
Fine. Don’t fight, I agree, that would be an unfair fight and a waste of time/money.
The US court system requires a “good faith” effort to settle the issue before it enters the legal system. A cease and desist for example— whatever it is, you’d have plenty of time to simply decide it’s not worth it and remove the code once they take notice.
As it is, this is all no harm, no foul.
1. I copied this to disk, and I've iterated on it. Derivative work. Company owns it.
2. I created a new original work from scratch, based on my experiencing doing it once or twice before. Independent work. Author owns it.
IANAL; ut's not quite that simple, but it's in the right general direction. If you need specific advice, talk to an actual lawyer tho.
That said, I think OP is morally in the right here, and I wish I had the guts to do similar things.
Sharing code is a good thing. Helping one company innovate using code that another company chose to ignore is also a good thing.
You're making a huge assumption that this is what happened.