9 ms·

IBM to Kernel Maintainer: “You Are an IBM Employee 100% of the Time”

127 points by tankenmate 6y ago

NikolaNovak 6y ago
To see the lovely flames, trolling, and attacks this limited piece of info entices, see previous thread from 12hrs ago... you've been warned ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877
- tyingq 6y ago
  It is hard to know what happened from the small bit of information. However, there's really no context where the phrase "You Are an IBM Employee 100% of the Time" is good. Edit: Meaning the tone and language suggest a work culture you might want to avoid. Separate from any actual policy.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    It's obviously bad wording, but isn't that exactly what the law of employment suggests? If not, what problem are these[1] articles trying to solve, as there shouldn't be any? I might be wrong, please correct me if so. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanmichelson2/2019/02/01/7-tips-for-ensuring-you-own-your-side-hustle-and-the-profits/?sh=7b790eac3fa5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanmichelson2/2019/02/01/7-tip...
    - monsieurbanana 6y ago
      That's 1) highly dependant of where you are 2) still worth discussing when companies do try to enforce that for no good reason, even if they can (and often they can't, but still do as a scare tactic) The law isn't the end of all things.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Think of it less as "we own you 100%" and more as "you represent IBM in what you do, especially in a kernel drive for an IBM project".
MattIPv4 6y ago
"You are an IBM employee 100% of the time" -- so this employee definitely gets paid for 100% of their time, right?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  My job doesn't fire me at 5pm every day and hire me back at 9am. I'm an employee of the company in my off hours, even if I'm not working.
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    And does your job prevent you from doing open source work in your free time? If not, then I don't see how it's relevant.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Often yes!! Check your contracts people or ask a lawyer. You'll be surprised.
      - monsieurbanana 6y ago
        > Often yes Then it should say so in the comment. Preferably adding their thoughts about it, whether it's enforced in their company, etc. Debating whether you're technically an employee 100% of your time is both true and needlessly pedantic.
        bonoboTP 6y ago
        It's a rhetorical argumentation technique. They make it seem like it's inevitable and follows naturally from the obvious fact that you are an employee 100% of the time, so they don't even need to spell out the specific point in the contract, implying that it's not just a technicality in the contract but something fundamental. Which is of course not true, as in many countries you can't have such valid terms.
arbitrage 6y ago
the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and ibm is still putting assholes in charge. glad that some things never change in this turbulent world of ours.
JackPoach 6y ago
Please let IBM know slavery is over.
- airhead969 6y ago
  America's ubiquitous but "invisible" "caste system" controls the poor and middle-classes with expectations of consumption, debt, "hard work is your duty," and meeting unreasonable demands.
lovedswain 6y ago
It would probably only take a handful of engineers to mount a solid DoS attack by requesting approval for every shell script they write, home Ubuntu ISO they install, or neighbour's printer they fix to get this policy a little more sensibly refined. In any case whoever wrote that e-mail to him is not someone I would possibly tolerate working for
- zvr 6y ago
  This is not a DoS attack -- this is business as usual, in some environments. And the employees cannot proceed with releasing scripts, patches, or other software until they have approval (this is the case we're talking about, not "ISO installs" or "neighbor printer fix").
robert_foss 6y ago
This all feel like something only a fevered corporate mind could dream up. But on the other hand it follows the same pattern IBM/Red Hat took w/r CentOS.
Jiejeing 6y ago
This probably works in the U.S.A. (or some of its states only, even), but prohibiting open-source work on the employee’s spare time is, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of Europe. Unless of course in the case of blatant conflict of interest between the open-source work and the product being worked on during company time. Contracts still include such clauses (mine does say that all intellectual property at any time during the validity of the contract is the property of the company), but no company in their right mind would go to court trying to enforce it.
- karatinversion 6y ago
  The article isn't 100% clear on this, but I got the impression this was the upstream driver for an IBM product (VNIC) that the guy worked on as part of his job, but listed his gmail address in the maintainers file... In which case, fair enough.
  - Jiejeing 6y ago
    If they work on it as part of their job, then sure (although I find the tone of the email very unprofessional). But it would have made more sense to update the file with a linux.ibm.com address like the other maintainers, rather than delete it.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Hmm, that might be valid. Maybe he should ask to have it prioritized at work to contribute officially to avoid any corporate PHB conflicts?
  - bombcar 6y ago
    My current kernel sources have: IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver M: Dany Madden <drt@linux.ibm.com> M: Lijun Pan <ljp@linux.ibm.com> M: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@linux.ibm.com> L: netdev@vger.kernel.org S: Supported F: drivers/net/ethernet/ibm/ibmvnic.* And so it looks like Lijun was asked to remove himself from the project (perhaps because he was reassigned at work or who knows why) and instead put himself with a gmail account, and then that was noticed and 'nice tried'.
hyko 6y ago
It’s things like this that make me realise I’m actually a free market socialist.
- gher-shyu3i 6y ago
  I don't think things like this lie on the capitalism-communism spectrum. You're an employee during work hours, and what you do outside of work hours is your own. It's completely orthogonal to capitalism or socialism. Capitalism definitely has its issues, but this is not one of them as far as I can tell.
  - hyko 6y ago
    Who said anything about Communism? I’m talking about the people who do the work for a business owning and managing the business themselves, and competing in a free marketplace. Having a class of workers and a class of capital owners is central to capitalism.
    - gher-shyu3i 6y ago
      Capitalist-communism spectrum, which socialism lies on it somewhere. Are you arguing for the abolishing of capital and business owners?
      - hyko 6y ago
        No, my view is essentially that companies should be democratic institutions, and in order to achieve that it means the workers must also be capital owners. Corporations today are essentially authoritarian regimes, whose agents have wide remit to dictate the working conditions of other people. The bit that usually confuses people about the socialist axis is that capitalism vs socialism is always framed in terms of free market enterprise vs statism; I’m arguing you can keep the free market dynamic while having a truly empowered workforce (not just some management spiel). This is very different to the models where the state either runs everything, or taxes private enterprise to run half the things.
sudeepj 6y ago
This reminds me of "How To Legally Own Another Person" [1] by Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1] https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person-4145a1802bf6 https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...
- nikanj 6y ago
  ”How to legally [thing]” tends to boil down to ”have an IBM-sized legal budget”
recursivedoubts 6y ago
“Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.” ― G. K. Chesterton
corbet 6y ago
The weird part is that IBM employees contribute to the kernel with personal email addresses all the time. I think this was one confused mid-level manager rather than company policy at work unless things have changed quite recently.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Sounds like an overzealous manager "respect my authoritah." I often find such people tend to be narcissistic trying to get control of other people because their own lack of internal sense of control. Edit: It isn't helpful for morale and makes employees want to leave whenever autonomy, purpose, social cohesion/community, and/or meaningfulness are threatened with, or actually, eliminated. I worked at a Big Name university academic dept where an insecure/inexperienced new manager postdoc came in and told the developers they're going to do X his way and they all immediately quit. And that classic video about motivation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWD2HdoZ7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWD2HdoZ7k
- bombcar 6y ago
  Do they contribute to the kernel with personal emails on IBM maintained projects? I could easily see a "We're IBM, we're going to maintain our IBM drive, here's the list of IBM maintainers" rule which would preclude a personal gmail account (especially if you were assigned OFF the project internally).
knorker 6y ago
This couldn't possibly backfire.
airhead969 6y ago
I don't see how this is legal anywhere but with IP exfil concerns, lack of disclaiming representation of views and effort, and/or not working on personal time on personal equipment at home. Did the story's subject work on company equipment from work?
QUFB 6y ago
Relevant Onion news article from 2003: https://www.theonion.com/ibm-emancipates-8-000-wage-slaves-1819567105 https://www.theonion.com/ibm-emancipates-8-000-wage-slaves-1...
- airhead969 6y ago
  Hahahaha. xD But are they still IP and branding slaves?
tempfs 6y ago
No one tell IBM that they own Redhat now and have a direct/vested interest in seeing the kernel that it depends on be non-shitty.
fidesomnes 6y ago
This isn't slavery at all, this is what absolute freedom and democracy looks like. (sarcasm)
mnd999 6y ago
Earlier discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877
ta988 6y ago
I wonder if IBM also have a clause forbidding use of IBM email and computer systems for non-work communication.
eplanit 6y ago
That's exactly what was explained to me when I joined IBM in the 1980s: "It doesn't matter if you're on the moon... if you have an idea, IBM owns it".
low_tech_love 6y ago
By far the part I like the most is ‘You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".’
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  To be fair, they should have the right to say you can't work on our project as a hobby. They did at least make an effort to say this was related to just VNIC.
ta988 6y ago
I really hope someone here that has an open position in a saner company will offer a job to that person.
mrweasel 6y ago
The thing I feel is missing is: Why? Why would IBM care that an employee spend free time working on something. Can they be held legally responsible or something? I can understand that if it's with normal working hours that they would like IBM to get the credit associated with a commit to the Linux kernel. That seems reasonable, given that they effectively bought that persons time. Also, is it only because he committed code to something related to IBM? Could he have submitted patches to other unrelated parts of the kernel, without using his IBM email?
- krona 6y ago
  If the employee works in a similar area within the company then there is no defense against copyright infringement in IBMs commercial product(s). Every IBM software engineer knows this and is inculcated annually. IBM basically doesn't care what you're doing unless there is a clear legal reason, at which point the company will move heaven and earth.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Why would IBM care that an employee spend free time working on something. According to some of the other comments here, this kernel work may have actually been part of his job rather than an unrelated free-time project.
- bombcar 6y ago
  Check the MAINTAINERS file in your current kernel sources: IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver M: Dany Madden <drt@linux.ibm.com> M: Lijun Pan <ljp@linux.ibm.com> M: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@linux.ibm.com> L: netdev@vger.kernel.org S: Supported F: drivers/net/ethernet/ibm/ibmvnic.* I don't know how to dig the diffs out of the kernel (maybe git blame on Linus' tree?) but clearly Lijun changed from his IBM address to his personal address at some point, and now the personal address is being removed.
- balozi 6y ago
  Obviously the practical problem employers have is that some employees will research using company time then produce on "personal time". It's a phenomena common to industries where creative work is compensated. Consider music, Hollywood, academia, etc. - other industries where this type of stipulation is common.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Perhaps I’m misreading this, but it appears that IBM employed him to work on this kernel driver. He was getting paid to do this, but he used his personal e-mail address. IBM wanted him to attribute his IBM-paid work for hire to IBM. If IBM was prohibiting employees from working on unrelated projects in their off time, that would obviously be bad. However, if they’re paying people to work on teams to develop open-source code, it’s not unreasonable to expect them to use their IBM e-mail address to do it.
austincheney 6y ago
Both ends of this subject are equally stupid and tone deaf. First of all the employee was working on a driver for an IBM product and is an IBM employee so the IBM opinion is not completely wrong even if awkward and extreme. If the employee wants to work on their employers products, even as a hobby outside of work, they should disclose their affiliation even if my email address. Secondly, many employers forbid moonlighting even when profit is not a motive. This is rare for a technology company but common for financial companies due to potential for ethical conflicts in both regulations and transfer of funds/services. On the other hand I remember submitting an RFC ID about 12 years ago for an alternative web technology where the technical merits of the idea would later become proposals in other forms more directly aligned to HTML5. The idea went back and forth on the mailing list about how it wasn’t worth considering unless directly aligned with HTML5 regardless of any technical merits. I eventually said “fuck this” and left. I remember after that side comments about how I wasn’t really employed by Sabre. I listed Sabre as my primary employer on the last page of the document. I didn’t have a Sabre Holdings email address because I worked for Travelocity a wholly owner subsidiary that did not own IP (Sabre did). I was also contributing to the mailing list using my military email because I wrote the document while working at Travelocity but had temporarily separated for a military deployment to Afghanistan. Fuck that group. My experience from working on open source taught me that an employer owns it and can slap a patent on it if not already exposed to the public. So, always expose your hobby work to the public using extreme licenses like AGPLv3 or CC0-1.0 and completely separate that work from any revenue stream until you are ready to incorporate.
m4tthumphrey 6y ago
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drXzppfQE8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drXzppfQE8Q
Communitivity 6y ago
Many companies will try to pull this. It is up to developers to not let them. Ideally we could leave it up to states to do something, like California has done (I have read these kinds of IPR agreements are non-enforceable if you work in California). Unfortunately, we have to do it ourselves. If top engineers refuse to enter into these agreements then companies will be forced to not use them in order to remain competitive. Of course, if you use the company's time, software, or hardware to create something then they own it as a work for hire. It's less clear if it's built on your own time with your own resources but using knowledge you learned as part of your job. Generally, from what I've read, you're in the clear so long as the knowledge is not proprietary - but I am not a lawyer. So be devout in separation of your IP and their IP, as church and state. This of course means being willing to walk if they require it as a condition of employment, but good developers have a lot of options in many markets.
rafael09ed 6y ago
0
kodah 6y ago
I know my company has this policy and they are in California. Whether the policy is enforceable or not does not matter when you're talking about someone's livelihood and personal hobbies. If a business can take both of those from you then they don't need a court to make it enforceable. It's enforceable via the sheer amount of determination and will-power you would need to tap into in order to defend this in court. I'm interested in if there's an open database of companies with this kind of policy. I certainly don't want to bully or harass them, but this is good information to know going into an interview.

127 points by tankenmate 6y ago

To see the lovely flames, trolling, and attacks this limited piece of info entices, see previous thread from 12hrs ago... you've been warned ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877

tyingq 6y ago
It is hard to know what happened from the small bit of information. However, there's really no context where the phrase "You Are an IBM Employee 100% of the Time" is good. Edit: Meaning the tone and language suggest a work culture you might want to avoid. Separate from any actual policy.
- emteycz 6y ago
  It's obviously bad wording, but isn't that exactly what the law of employment suggests? If not, what problem are these[1] articles trying to solve, as there shouldn't be any? I might be wrong, please correct me if so. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanmichelson2/2019/02/01/7-tips-for-ensuring-you-own-your-side-hustle-and-the-profits/?sh=7b790eac3fa5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanmichelson2/2019/02/01/7-tip...
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    That's 1) highly dependant of where you are 2) still worth discussing when companies do try to enforce that for no good reason, even if they can (and often they can't, but still do as a scare tactic) The law isn't the end of all things.
- bombcar 6y ago
  Think of it less as "we own you 100%" and more as "you represent IBM in what you do, especially in a kernel drive for an IBM project".

MattIPv4 6y ago

"You are an IBM employee 100% of the time" -- so this employee definitely gets paid for 100% of their time, right?

ceejayoz 6y ago
My job doesn't fire me at 5pm every day and hire me back at 9am. I'm an employee of the company in my off hours, even if I'm not working.
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  And does your job prevent you from doing open source work in your free time? If not, then I don't see how it's relevant.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Often yes!! Check your contracts people or ask a lawyer. You'll be surprised.
    - monsieurbanana 6y ago
      > Often yes Then it should say so in the comment. Preferably adding their thoughts about it, whether it's enforced in their company, etc. Debating whether you're technically an employee 100% of your time is both true and needlessly pedantic.
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        It's a rhetorical argumentation technique. They make it seem like it's inevitable and follows naturally from the obvious fact that you are an employee 100% of the time, so they don't even need to spell out the specific point in the contract, implying that it's not just a technicality in the contract but something fundamental. Which is of course not true, as in many countries you can't have such valid terms.

arbitrage 6y ago

the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and ibm is still putting assholes in charge. glad that some things never change in this turbulent world of ours.

JackPoach 6y ago

Please let IBM know slavery is over.

airhead969 6y ago
America's ubiquitous but "invisible" "caste system" controls the poor and middle-classes with expectations of consumption, debt, "hard work is your duty," and meeting unreasonable demands.

lovedswain 6y ago

It would probably only take a handful of engineers to mount a solid DoS attack by requesting approval for every shell script they write, home Ubuntu ISO they install, or neighbour's printer they fix to get this policy a little more sensibly refined. In any case whoever wrote that e-mail to him is not someone I would possibly tolerate working for

zvr 6y ago
This is not a DoS attack -- this is business as usual, in some environments. And the employees cannot proceed with releasing scripts, patches, or other software until they have approval (this is the case we're talking about, not "ISO installs" or "neighbor printer fix").

robert_foss 6y ago

This all feel like something only a fevered corporate mind could dream up. But on the other hand it follows the same pattern IBM/Red Hat took w/r CentOS.

Jiejeing 6y ago

This probably works in the U.S.A. (or some of its states only, even), but prohibiting open-source work on the employee’s spare time is, to the best of my knowledge, illegal in most of Europe. Unless of course in the case of blatant conflict of interest between the open-source work and the product being worked on during company time. Contracts still include such clauses (mine does say that all intellectual property at any time during the validity of the contract is the property of the company), but no company in their right mind would go to court trying to enforce it.

karatinversion 6y ago
The article isn't 100% clear on this, but I got the impression this was the upstream driver for an IBM product (VNIC) that the guy worked on as part of his job, but listed his gmail address in the maintainers file... In which case, fair enough.
- Jiejeing 6y ago
  If they work on it as part of their job, then sure (although I find the tone of the email very unprofessional). But it would have made more sense to update the file with a linux.ibm.com address like the other maintainers, rather than delete it.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Hmm, that might be valid. Maybe he should ask to have it prioritized at work to contribute officially to avoid any corporate PHB conflicts?
- bombcar 6y ago
  My current kernel sources have: IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver M: Dany Madden <drt@linux.ibm.com> M: Lijun Pan <ljp@linux.ibm.com> M: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@linux.ibm.com> L: netdev@vger.kernel.org S: Supported F: drivers/net/ethernet/ibm/ibmvnic.* And so it looks like Lijun was asked to remove himself from the project (perhaps because he was reassigned at work or who knows why) and instead put himself with a gmail account, and then that was noticed and 'nice tried'.

hyko 6y ago

It’s things like this that make me realise I’m actually a free market socialist.

gher-shyu3i 6y ago
I don't think things like this lie on the capitalism-communism spectrum. You're an employee during work hours, and what you do outside of work hours is your own. It's completely orthogonal to capitalism or socialism. Capitalism definitely has its issues, but this is not one of them as far as I can tell.
- hyko 6y ago
  Who said anything about Communism? I’m talking about the people who do the work for a business owning and managing the business themselves, and competing in a free marketplace. Having a class of workers and a class of capital owners is central to capitalism.
  - gher-shyu3i 6y ago
    Capitalist-communism spectrum, which socialism lies on it somewhere. Are you arguing for the abolishing of capital and business owners?
    - hyko 6y ago
      No, my view is essentially that companies should be democratic institutions, and in order to achieve that it means the workers must also be capital owners. Corporations today are essentially authoritarian regimes, whose agents have wide remit to dictate the working conditions of other people. The bit that usually confuses people about the socialist axis is that capitalism vs socialism is always framed in terms of free market enterprise vs statism; I’m arguing you can keep the free market dynamic while having a truly empowered workforce (not just some management spiel). This is very different to the models where the state either runs everything, or taxes private enterprise to run half the things.

sudeepj 6y ago

This reminds me of "How To Legally Own Another Person" [1] by Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1] https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person-4145a1802bf6 https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...

nikanj 6y ago
”How to legally [thing]” tends to boil down to ”have an IBM-sized legal budget”

recursivedoubts 6y ago

“Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.” ― G. K. Chesterton

corbet 6y ago

The weird part is that IBM employees contribute to the kernel with personal email addresses all the time. I think this was one confused mid-level manager rather than company policy at work unless things have changed quite recently.

airhead969 6y ago
Sounds like an overzealous manager "respect my authoritah." I often find such people tend to be narcissistic trying to get control of other people because their own lack of internal sense of control. Edit: It isn't helpful for morale and makes employees want to leave whenever autonomy, purpose, social cohesion/community, and/or meaningfulness are threatened with, or actually, eliminated. I worked at a Big Name university academic dept where an insecure/inexperienced new manager postdoc came in and told the developers they're going to do X his way and they all immediately quit. And that classic video about motivation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWD2HdoZ7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWD2HdoZ7k
bombcar 6y ago
Do they contribute to the kernel with personal emails on IBM maintained projects? I could easily see a "We're IBM, we're going to maintain our IBM drive, here's the list of IBM maintainers" rule which would preclude a personal gmail account (especially if you were assigned OFF the project internally).

knorker 6y ago

This couldn't possibly backfire.

airhead969 6y ago

I don't see how this is legal anywhere but with IP exfil concerns, lack of disclaiming representation of views and effort, and/or not working on personal time on personal equipment at home. Did the story's subject work on company equipment from work?

QUFB 6y ago

Relevant Onion news article from 2003: https://www.theonion.com/ibm-emancipates-8-000-wage-slaves-1819567105 https://www.theonion.com/ibm-emancipates-8-000-wage-slaves-1...

airhead969 6y ago
Hahahaha. xD But are they still IP and branding slaves?

tempfs 6y ago

No one tell IBM that they own Redhat now and have a direct/vested interest in seeing the kernel that it depends on be non-shitty.

fidesomnes 6y ago

This isn't slavery at all, this is what absolute freedom and democracy looks like. (sarcasm)

mnd999 6y ago

Earlier discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877

ta988 6y ago

I wonder if IBM also have a clause forbidding use of IBM email and computer systems for non-work communication.

eplanit 6y ago

That's exactly what was explained to me when I joined IBM in the 1980s: "It doesn't matter if you're on the moon... if you have an idea, IBM owns it".

low_tech_love 6y ago

By far the part I like the most is ‘You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".’

that_guy_iain 6y ago
To be fair, they should have the right to say you can't work on our project as a hobby. They did at least make an effort to say this was related to just VNIC.

ta988 6y ago

I really hope someone here that has an open position in a saner company will offer a job to that person.

mrweasel 6y ago

The thing I feel is missing is: Why? Why would IBM care that an employee spend free time working on something. Can they be held legally responsible or something? I can understand that if it's with normal working hours that they would like IBM to get the credit associated with a commit to the Linux kernel. That seems reasonable, given that they effectively bought that persons time. Also, is it only because he committed code to something related to IBM? Could he have submitted patches to other unrelated parts of the kernel, without using his IBM email?

krona 6y ago
If the employee works in a similar area within the company then there is no defense against copyright infringement in IBMs commercial product(s). Every IBM software engineer knows this and is inculcated annually. IBM basically doesn't care what you're doing unless there is a clear legal reason, at which point the company will move heaven and earth.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Why would IBM care that an employee spend free time working on something. According to some of the other comments here, this kernel work may have actually been part of his job rather than an unrelated free-time project.
bombcar 6y ago
Check the MAINTAINERS file in your current kernel sources: IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver M: Dany Madden <drt@linux.ibm.com> M: Lijun Pan <ljp@linux.ibm.com> M: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@linux.ibm.com> L: netdev@vger.kernel.org S: Supported F: drivers/net/ethernet/ibm/ibmvnic.* I don't know how to dig the diffs out of the kernel (maybe git blame on Linus' tree?) but clearly Lijun changed from his IBM address to his personal address at some point, and now the personal address is being removed.
balozi 6y ago
Obviously the practical problem employers have is that some employees will research using company time then produce on "personal time". It's a phenomena common to industries where creative work is compensated. Consider music, Hollywood, academia, etc. - other industries where this type of stipulation is common.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

Perhaps I’m misreading this, but it appears that IBM employed him to work on this kernel driver. He was getting paid to do this, but he used his personal e-mail address. IBM wanted him to attribute his IBM-paid work for hire to IBM. If IBM was prohibiting employees from working on unrelated projects in their off time, that would obviously be bad. However, if they’re paying people to work on teams to develop open-source code, it’s not unreasonable to expect them to use their IBM e-mail address to do it.

austincheney 6y ago

Both ends of this subject are equally stupid and tone deaf. First of all the employee was working on a driver for an IBM product and is an IBM employee so the IBM opinion is not completely wrong even if awkward and extreme. If the employee wants to work on their employers products, even as a hobby outside of work, they should disclose their affiliation even if my email address. Secondly, many employers forbid moonlighting even when profit is not a motive. This is rare for a technology company but common for financial companies due to potential for ethical conflicts in both regulations and transfer of funds/services. On the other hand I remember submitting an RFC ID about 12 years ago for an alternative web technology where the technical merits of the idea would later become proposals in other forms more directly aligned to HTML5. The idea went back and forth on the mailing list about how it wasn’t worth considering unless directly aligned with HTML5 regardless of any technical merits. I eventually said “fuck this” and left. I remember after that side comments about how I wasn’t really employed by Sabre. I listed Sabre as my primary employer on the last page of the document. I didn’t have a Sabre Holdings email address because I worked for Travelocity a wholly owner subsidiary that did not own IP (Sabre did). I was also contributing to the mailing list using my military email because I wrote the document while working at Travelocity but had temporarily separated for a military deployment to Afghanistan. Fuck that group. My experience from working on open source taught me that an employer owns it and can slap a patent on it if not already exposed to the public. So, always expose your hobby work to the public using extreme licenses like AGPLv3 or CC0-1.0 and completely separate that work from any revenue stream until you are ready to incorporate.

m4tthumphrey 6y ago

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drXzppfQE8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drXzppfQE8Q

Communitivity 6y ago

Many companies will try to pull this. It is up to developers to not let them. Ideally we could leave it up to states to do something, like California has done (I have read these kinds of IPR agreements are non-enforceable if you work in California). Unfortunately, we have to do it ourselves. If top engineers refuse to enter into these agreements then companies will be forced to not use them in order to remain competitive. Of course, if you use the company's time, software, or hardware to create something then they own it as a work for hire. It's less clear if it's built on your own time with your own resources but using knowledge you learned as part of your job. Generally, from what I've read, you're in the clear so long as the knowledge is not proprietary - but I am not a lawyer. So be devout in separation of your IP and their IP, as church and state. This of course means being willing to walk if they require it as a condition of employment, but good developers have a lot of options in many markets.

rafael09ed 6y ago

kodah 6y ago

I know my company has this policy and they are in California. Whether the policy is enforceable or not does not matter when you're talking about someone's livelihood and personal hobbies. If a business can take both of those from you then they don't need a court to make it enforceable. It's enforceable via the sheer amount of determination and will-power you would need to tap into in order to defend this in court. I'm interested in if there's an open database of companies with this kind of policy. I certainly don't want to bully or harass them, but this is good information to know going into an interview.