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Comment by dudleydoright | Hacker News Reader

Former Amazonian here.

When I was employed:

To do ANY FOSS work as an individual unrelated to the company (And I mean ANY: private projects that may be on Github, projects with nothing to do with Amazon) required a one-off application for permission.

To actually contribute something to some FOSS project that is in use at Amazon (For example, to fix a bug) requires even more special permissions (I think it is once per submission but cannot remember).

This is to "protect Amazon IP"; you can imagine why people try and skip the hassle.

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I'm a prolific open source contributor, and I found it strange when Amazon tried to recruit me.

Let me get this straight: you're scouting me because of all this open source stuff which you will now insist I abandon.

You don't have to abandon. You just have to check your ego and contribute anonymously, with full corporate backing.

I would rather work for a company that appreciates the value of my open source involvement and encourages me to develop it further.

This is bad advice and creates a liability for the project. Many large FOSS projects require you to identify yourself and sign a committer's agreement.

You forgot to mention the blanket "no game development" policy, which apparently includes activities such as discussing game ideas or giving feedback to friends that are developing their own games.

Lately I've been hearing that we (Amazon employees) are required to get approval to take any online courses, such as offerings from Coursera. Something about you may write code that gets shown to someone outside the company blah blah blah.

The way things are playing out seems a bit ridiculous. I do wonder some times if Amazon is going to start trying to say that you can't contribute funds to a certain organization because it may "compete with the interests of Amazon."

Is this in your contract / some IP agreement you sign? I wonder if they would drop this as fast as they dropped the warehouse employee anti-compete agreement if it was publicized.

It would also be interesting to hear from a lawyer with relevant expertise if that is actually enforceable for most employees.

IANAL.

It's in pretty much every employment contract in the software industry. Washington has code 49.44.140 which makes such terms unenforceable unless:

>(a) the invention relates

> (i) directly to the business of the employer, or

> (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development,

>or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer

California has section 2870, which is almost identical.

The problem is that those terms are vague enough that they can be construed to apply to pretty much any software. The big companies have varied enough business that (a) is hard to get away from, especially if it's Web based and you work for Amazon/Google/Facebook, and software techniques are generalizable that they could probably claim (b) as well. As a result, all of those companies have various internal processes to request that the company either release IP for side projects or allow it to be open sourced with the company as the copyright holder but the employee listed as the author.

This clause was the sticking point of the last employment contract I signed. I tried to insist that they separate the compensation they were offering me into the portion for my general employment and the portion for these outside ideas so that I could decide which to accept. They never would do that, but I ended up getting a 30% higher offer through this negotiation.

"The problem is that those terms are vague enough that they can be construed to apply to pretty much any software."

Bingo. Amazon has it's fingers in everything. Games, machine learning, language development, OS development, distributed computing, general algorithm development, video... It's pretty much impossible to find anything that doesn't "compete" with the company.

As an Amazonian, I was shocked one day by telling my colleagues about some javascript widget I am working on and a plan to open source it, I got warned that pretty much everything that developed on my laptop belongs to the company, thus I need my manager's permission to open source something that is not pretty much not related to anything in do in my fulltime job....

Same rules apply now.

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