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> And yet loads of people employed by companies work on open source software, write blogs, ... [snip] ... Is it something like companies legally may be able to

> And yet loads of people employed by companies work on open source software, write blogs, ... [snip] ... Is it something like companies legally may be able to assert ownership For open source software and blogs, is it feasible to argue that they are a form of free speech thus cannot be owned (or in practice restricted accesses) by companies?

hollerith 8y ago
That is not how it works. The court might decide in favor of the employee, but if it does, it won't do it on free-speech grounds.
vegetablepotpie 8y ago
That's an interesting point. I actually talked to a lawyer at my company 6 months ago about contributing to FOSS and their answer was that my work may be owned by my company if I did the work on my own time outside of working hours and therefore wouldn't be mine to put under a free license in the first place. The lawyer declined to comment on what cases my work on a project may be owned by the company or not and said to fill out a conflict on interest form if I decided to work on a project.
usrusr 8y ago
What about free software that reimplements something you have worked on by day? Should be quite clearly the pro-employer interpretation and not free speech if the problem space is the employer's core business, but maybe debatable if it's just domain independent supporting infrastructure (someone already mentioned JS tables, surely not core business if your employer is e.g. a bank) I think that this must be a quite common situation: someone works on a solution to a "supporting" problem (js table or whatever), feels that the approach taken might be worthy of being a clean, reusable library. Maybe the thought of publishing isn't even there yet, it would just be nice to have the the API cleaned up for reuse as an in-house library. But there's no corporate time for that. Next stop: clean room supplementation from memory for open sourcing. Feels innocuous, but has trouble written all over it, good luck with "free speech". And it's tragic, because the employer would most likely be the sole beneficiary of the cleaned up reimplementation.

hollerith 8y ago

That is not how it works. The court might decide in favor of the employee, but if it does, it won't do it on free-speech grounds.

vegetablepotpie 8y ago

That's an interesting point. I actually talked to a lawyer at my company 6 months ago about contributing to FOSS and their answer was that my work may be owned by my company if I did the work on my own time outside of working hours and therefore wouldn't be mine to put under a free license in the first place. The lawyer declined to comment on what cases my work on a project may be owned by the company or not and said to fill out a conflict on interest form if I decided to work on a project.

usrusr 8y ago

What about free software that reimplements something you have worked on by day? Should be quite clearly the pro-employer interpretation and not free speech if the problem space is the employer's core business, but maybe debatable if it's just domain independent supporting infrastructure (someone already mentioned JS tables, surely not core business if your employer is e.g. a bank) I think that this must be a quite common situation: someone works on a solution to a "supporting" problem (js table or whatever), feels that the approach taken might be worthy of being a clean, reusable library. Maybe the thought of publishing isn't even there yet, it would just be nice to have the the API cleaned up for reuse as an in-house library. But there's no corporate time for that. Next stop: clean room supplementation from memory for open sourcing. Feels innocuous, but has trouble written all over it, good luck with "free speech". And it's tragic, because the employer would most likely be the sole beneficiary of the cleaned up reimplementation.