24 ms·

Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

605 points by giansegato 5y ago

pabs3 5y ago
I note that Software Freedom Conservancy advocates renegotiating your contract to retain ownership of code you write for open source projects you work on: https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/
game_the0ry 5y ago
UPDATE - twitter/@arkann1985 was just hired by Google [1]. Well done, Arkaddii, and fuck you to Bumble. [1] https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1467914399381925888 https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1467914399381925888
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
I am almost certain that IP law overrides and voids any abusive contract in the UK. Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Why do you believe that? There is specific wording that is customary to use in an employment contract in at least England and Wales (along the lines of "work done in the course of your employment") if that sort of agreement is intended. It would typically cover work done on employer time, using the employer's resources, or in a field related to working for the employer, and you have to be careful about how broadly the latter can be interpreted in the context of the rest of the contract. It is also sadly not unusual for employers to seek IP rights to all creative work done by a salaried employee during their term of employment as an explicit provision of the employment contract. Most of us here might consider that abusive but it might remove ambiguity and put the employer on safer ground legally in the event of a later dispute, and lawyers gonna lawyer. I have argued before that an employee should reject that kind of excessively broad term and if working in a creative industry like software development they should seriously consider whether they really want to work for that employer if the employer is unwilling to change to the more customary contractual agreement when it is challenged. But a lot of people just sign contracts without reading them and unfortunately OP may be in trouble here if that is what they did. If the employment contract contains no IP clauses that make the agreement explicit then maybe the course of employment rule would be the default but this would be very unlikely for anyone working in a creative industry and OP's description suggests there is specific wording being cited in this case. I am not a lawyer. The understanding above does come from discussing this issue with real lawyers in England more than once, but not since a few years ago. As always, get your legal advice from a real lawyer if it matters and not from some random HN comment.
  - boudin 5y ago
    This sounds lile really greay areas though. Can an employer claim the work of something done outside of work (as in paid) hours? If the employer didn't retribute this time in the first place, can it be considered as being in the "course of the employment"? This seems that if this kind of super generic statement will always go in the way of the employer, it would be a giant loophole to go any regulation on working hours. In this specific case though we don't really know the details and maybe some of the work was done during working hours.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      There might also be a clause in a salaried employee's contract that specifically requires them to notify the employer of any other work they are doing and get permission, precisely because otherwise the employer could end up in trouble under working time rules through no fault of their own. As I understand it, this area can get very tricky because you have several general positions in law here that might be in conflict. For example, normally restraint of trade is not allowed, but there is also an implicit condition in any employment contract that the employee will properly serve their employer and that might include not doing other things that would interfere with their responsibilities as an employee. Then there is the whole question of whether work can be done off the clock for a salaried employee given there are limits on working hours and minimum wage requirements (though the latter probably won't be a relevant factor for anyone writing software). There have been related questions about people who are on call and they can get messy so it is not hard to imagine a case about IP rights getting messy with similar arguments being made by both sides. Again, what OP needs here is a real employment lawyer. Without seeing the contract and other relevant information the most we can do is discuss the general issues, and even then and when this information all came from real lawyers, I am still cautious because my knowledge might be out of date or there might be other relevant factors we didn't discuss.
      - boudin 5y ago
        It's definitely something really complex. My contract does have a clause requiring me to notify them about side activities. It's a small company and, from what I gathered when I discussed the contract with the founder back then, a lawyer advised him to add this clause to protect the company indeed. My advise to any company that is thinking to do the same thing that this one did to this developer, if you're interested by the open source projects of one of your employee, sponsor it, give time to your employee to contribute in his/her working hours for example. You'll have a much better outcome.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  UK law is pretty clear: if you are a contractor then you own everything you create, but if you are a salaried employee (”work for hire”) then your employer owns everything you create that’s related to the business. If you write Perl for a bank they don’t own the songs you compose in the shower (they afe outside the ”scope of employment”.) They probably own your money manager side project though. “Probably” here means, as always, “has a good chance of winning at tribunal” rather than any defensible logical meaning.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    The default position might be something like that but anyone writing software professionally surely has explicit provisions in their employment contract that would take precedence (as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course).
    - ajb 5y ago
      Contacts don't override every law. Ever heard of inalienable rights? Those are ones that you can't contact away.
      - Silhouette 5y ago
        Which "inalienable right" applies here?
        ajb 5y ago
        In fact in the UK I think you are right, my apologies. It's California where the Labour code protects inventions made in the employees own time: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=2870 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course Which they don't because it makes no sense. Transpose to a car mechanic fixing up junkers in their spare time, does the fixed junker belong to the company? Of course not.
turbinerneiter 5y ago
Bumble has a wave of abuse incoming. Everyone checking their Twitter account will see a stream of wokeness and be triggered by the discrepancy to their petty evil behaviour. This kind of ignorance is and should be pretty damaging to their brand, although I already sympathize with their poor social media workers who will have to deal with the onslaught.
- geewee 5y ago
  What does "a stream of wokeness" mean?
  - mellosouls 5y ago
    Presumably it means they are obnoxiously pious.
  - onemiketwelve 5y ago
    It means they're about to get a butt load of criticism and I'm an asshole
    - turbinerneiter 5y ago
      Are you calling me an asshole? For what?
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    It means that every one of their tweets is about a woke topic. Don't shoot the messenger. It's not my fault that the term was transformed into a toxic ridicule by the right. When in first learned the term it was in connection with conscious rap and meant people who think and consider important social issues. Now it's apperantly right wing hate speech.
kgeist 5y ago
Here in Russia Rambler tried to do the same with nginx, and they failed to achieve their goals. I don't know, it creates nothing but bad publicity without giving anything in return considering they won't maintain it anyway if the core devs leave (and nothing stops them from forking and creating their commercial solution right now). The image of Rambler before: "Igor Sysoev created nginx while working at Rambler" (positive association). The image now: "Igor Sysoev created nginx in his spare time and he just happened to work for Rambler at the time and Rambler tried to take away his project by SWATing their office". It's like some pointless greed ("it's mine!!") above all pragmatism.
- ainar-g 5y ago
  It seems like at a certain level, when a company achieves an unfortunate combination of buttloads of money and incompetent leadership, that company starts to think that it is above puny human concepts like reputation. Compare it with the behaviour of A Certain Database Company, Whose Name Is Similar To “Oral Care”.
  - znpy 5y ago
    I know a company whose name is similar to that, and many people say claim that company has no customers, only hostages.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I don't know how copyright laws work in Russia, but it's a bit of a gray area in America when you write code for someone unless it's explicitly spelled out in the contract. The end product (compiled binary or whatever they're paying for to "just work") belongs to them, but the source code does not belong to them unless it's explicitly stated in a work-for-hire contract that all of your intellectual property goes to them while you're hired. I always make it clear in my contracts that I am not re-selling rights to anything I build that's derived from FOSS or, even my own code if it's part of my own open source projects; the client cannot own something that is not for sale, just by hiring me on an hourly basis. I make sure to communicate that with them verbally as well beforehand, in case they mistakenly have the idea that they are buying the rights to something that I can't legally sell them. Usually I present them a list of modules and files that will be used in their project which (a) are FOSS, (b) belong to me, and (c) which I will write for them that they can reuse/rewrite/resell the source code for.
DarthNebo 5y ago
GitHub should try to enable some sort of toggled anonymous mode for select repos, while users should make their FOSS/social identities less obvious or decoupled if their employers aren't that friendly with such clauses. With remote work becoming more pervasive, employees should really not be doing any personal things on work computers because their traffic is definitely going to be analysed by someone or some system. Just a general reminder as well - Companies/Govt's would absolutely love for GitHub/Gitlab or any social platform to require ID card verification for users if that was on the table.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Such an anonymous mode would be damaging for GitHub because it needs to stay friendly with its commercial and corporate customers. Besides, such a mode only provides obfuscation, but no legal protection at all. In fact, lawyers would turn it around and claim that using that mode showed that the owner of a repo was aware that what they were doing was wrong. Your idea would have a better chance of success as a separate platform dedicated to anonymous code hosting. But that in turn would likely attract bad actors, as usual.
  - wruza 5y ago
    lawyers would turn it around and claim that using that mode showed that the owner of a repo was aware that what they were doing was wrong Can’t you turn it around and claim that it was done to reduce the possibility of debating with idiots who like to unreasonably turn things around by blah blahing all possible and impossible versions out of thin air?
  - DarthNebo 5y ago
    I meant someway for the repo to exist without coming under a specific individual, like an organisation would make more sense instead of having repos under your public profile. But then again the user has to be careful with their email addresses with every commit.
swiftcoder 5y ago
Assuming for the moment that their claim is legally sound, what are the practical implications? The code is already published under an open-source license, with multiple other contributors to which they don't have an employment relationship... Ownership would allow them to relicense the employees original contributions, but they'd still need to negotiate with or replace all code by other contributors, and they can't un-opensource the existing codebase, right?
- Silhouette 5y ago
  If the copyright has always belonged to the employer then OP never had the legal ability to license it as open source in the first place. The employer could presumably shut the whole project down and in theory even go after others for copyright infringement retrospectively. If there have been other contributors then the employer would not magically get the copyright to those contributions though, which could leave the whole project in limbo with no-one having enough rights to continue working on it and releasing the results.
- davidgerard 5y ago
  They want the official repo.
pjc50 5y ago
Check. Your. Contracts. It is risky to do open source work without having a written agreement with your employer that exempts it.
- dmos62 5y ago
  Should your work in spare time be explicitly exempt in the contract, or, if side projects are not mentioned in the contract, does that implicitly exempt it?
  - em-bee 5y ago
    depends on the country where you work. i believe in the US it is generally assumed that everything you do belongs to the employer even if not specifically mentioned. in some countries it is restricted to work done during work hours or on company equipment. in those countries it is safe if you work at home on your own computer, at least if the contract doesn't mention anything to the contrary. if the contract does claim personal work then it depends on whether that is legal or not.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      > i believe in the US it is generally assumed that everything you do belongs to the employer even if not specifically mentioned. https://store.legal.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/news-views/corporate-counsel/employer-and-employee-ownership-of-intellectual-property-not-as-easy-as-you-think https://store.legal.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/news-vie...
- elric 5y ago
  Read the contract before you sign it. Don't work for companies that include any clauses what you can or cannot do in your free time (excluding reasonable exceptions, such as not directly competing with $employer). This sort of greed/zealotry on the side of employers is why some FOSS projects are such a pain to contribute to (i.e. anything that's part of the Eclipse Foundation). You pretty much have to sign your name in blood on a contributor agreement, and you may even have to get your employer to sign it too. This is madness. Slavery is not a thing. Employers do not own us.
greatgib 5y ago
Here the question is even a little bit more interesting than just the "open source" code you created I think: There is lot of discussion about the ownership of the code, but what about the other things related to the project? Like stars and issues. In no way stars and issues belongs to the company, they belongs to each user that submitted them. They submitted them to the project that was on a specific username. So, I'm not sure that the company could legally ask to take over that by force without the user agreeing. Imagine if a company ask that "you transfer your likes to us"...
- ainar-g 5y ago
  An interesting related question I've always had is what even counts as a contribution. For example, consider the three situations: (a) I open an issue about a feature not working. E.g.: “When I press the button, the app crashes”. (b) Same as (a), but I also point out the place in the code where the error is without providing any code to fix it. E.g. “When I press the button, the app crashes, and I think that it has to do with a null pointer dereference in function pkg.foo()”. (c) Same as (b), but I also provide a simple diff to fix it, but not a formally submitted merge/pull request. The (c) sounds close enough to a contribution but not quite. And I'm not sure about (a) and (b).
  - dmurray 5y ago
    I think there's a clear distinction in most jurisdictions between (c) and the other two. Let's suppose this bug report really was written on company time, with company equipment, related to the company's business, so we don't have to argue about how far-reaching your employer's rights should be here. In (a) and (b), you've provided services to the code maintainers. Perhaps your employment contract forbids you from doing that, just as it might prohibit you doing project management or fixing their plumbing. But the recipient of those services hasn't done anything wrong. In (c) you've additionally created intellectual property, to which you have some rights, including copyright. The code maintainers can't use that code in their product unless you assign them certain of those rights (or unless they can avail of other exemptions like fair use). But those rights might not be yours to assign - they might be your employer's. In addition to you potentially breaking your agreement with your employer, anyone republishing this code may be infringing your employer's IP rights (maybe under good faith, maybe you indemnified them... But still your employer has a legitimate complaint).
mellosouls 5y ago
I don't know the history of the development, and I'm instinctively against overreach by employers but considering both repos are clearly influenced by repos on similar platforms (eg Badoo), it doesn't seem unreasonable for Bumble to at least take an interest in their provenance and - if they have been developed on company time and equipment - their ownership.
- qwertyboi 5y ago
  Practically speaking, Badoo/Bumble doesn't go after EVERY OSS project written by an employee. MVIKotlin is conceptually the same as badoo/MVICore, and even Decompose is conceptually the same as badoo/ribs. If these projects are "eerily similar" and both were written on company time, the official variants (MVICore, RIBs) having been written by dedicated teams while the other two (MVIKotlin, Decompose) written in rogue, then what do you do? P.S.: Badoo and Bumble have the same owner, so "influenced by Badoo" is the same as "influenced by Bumble".
- StrLght 5y ago
  JFYI: Bumble and Badoo are the same company.
  - mellosouls 5y ago
    Thanks, I didn't know that, but I think it reinforces the point.
buzzwords 5y ago
Does anyone know what is the rational for Bumble to do this?
- dvhh 5y ago
  It will be something that we might never know Maybe juste to spite a leaving employee.
  - buzzwords 5y ago
    That's the worst part of it. The move has very little benefit for them.
    - danschuller 5y ago
      It's massively negative. Like the US, software developers are in massive demand in the UK. If you see this story, are you going to bother going through the interview process here, or apply to any of the hundreds of other companies that haven't publicly demonstrated terrible leadership.
- some-more-info 5y ago
  The rationale is that what other people here are saying - that Bumble (Badoo) should have paid them on company time to contribute to open-source - was already happening. Bumble owns under the Badoo repository two projects, called badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs. These libraries are developed on company time by employees, as open-source. If you check MVIKotlin and Decompose, you'll see that they're conceptually equivalent. You could therefore argue it is, in fact, using company resources. But badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs are the two official frameworks written and released by Badoo. Then, what is MVIKotlin and Decompose, and does Badoo own the rights to it - if it was developed on company time, based on pre-existing source code owned by the company?
  - bluesign 5y ago
    yeah both MVIKotlin and Decompose says they are inspired by badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs.
_odey 5y ago
I've asked this before and never got a straight answer, but I'll ask again: what exact clauses do I need to modify in the employment contract, and what exactly must they say, in order to avoid this sort of situation? (relevant to UK employment that is). If you've solved this for yourself, please tell us all how and what it's written in yours so we can do the same. Here is a link to what my previous employment contract stated about copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24220800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24220800 (right now I'm just a shareholder in a company and not employed). Basically it says employer owns all, and I'd like that to say something else... but what?
- bsenftner 5y ago
  Believe it or not, this actually works: bring your attorney with you to the interview, and accept no interview less than product lead. Basically, it's an arms race currently using guns, and the majority of the dumb ass developers show up with knives.
  - larsrc 5y ago
    If you're in a union, bring a union lawyer. If you're not, well, this is why you might want to be.
- andi999 5y ago
  Talk to a work contract specialized lawyer. Even apart from this issue, there might be other issues in the contract, so why not alway talk to one before signing.
  - _odey 5y ago
    I would like to see something that already exists and was used successfully first, so I don't go and talk to one empty handed... It's one thing to say: "I'd like to keep ownership of code I write on my free time" and another to add "like all these others do so already" to that statement. Maybe I could try emailing the FSF and asking for hints, as I'm registered with them to be able to contribute to emacs, and actually need to inform them about employment contracts changes and things like this in general. But still, there must exist somebody, somewhere, that has something reasonable written in their employment contract we could use as reference.
justshowpost 5y ago
Just imagine you hiring someone just to play with his Ruby pet projects all day long...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
joeyh 5y ago
Nothing in the APL requires he transfer the git repos to them. If they own the license, he needs to update the license and copyright statements to match reality, maybe send them a courtesy copy in a tarball or whatever. That's all. Copyight cannot demand this ridiculous thing.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I would guess their position would be that they owned the code/copyright from the very outset, and didn't approve applying the APL to it. The license they want to use might be one that forbids posting the source code.
quiffledwerg 5y ago
Bumble gave him a cake for five years service recently, so the company can’t be that bad really. https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1446071099989663745?s=21 https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1446071099989663745?s=... Surely we can overlook the whole “give us your damn open source personal projects copyright grab or you’ll be chewing on big legal problems buddy” thing given the companies generosity with cake? The cake shows that Bumble really are good people. Reminds me of those famous words “speak softly and carry a big cake”.
- Kalium 5y ago
  The thing about companies past a fairly small size is that you cannot reason about them as a group with characteristics much beyond sharing an employer. Are they good people? Yes. Are they bad people? Yes. Are they vindictive, legalistic people? Yes. With this in mind, I would say that the cake shows that some part of the org is good people. We might consider being careful about how quickly and how aggressively we generalize this. I know where I've been in companies where parts of engineering were good people while other parts of the company had wonderful and bountiful opportunities to become good people.
- snthd 5y ago
  They're just fans of portal.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    "This was a triumph..."
marcinzm 5y ago
A note to Bumble, this makes me not want to work for you or anyone who is currently in a related leadership position at Bumble (ie: eng leadership, etc.). Given the lack of supply in engineering the bad publicity is going to cost you more than any miniscule gain. edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Same. They'll never hire good coders this way.
  - AndrewSChapman 5y ago
    There are plenty of excellent engineers at Bumble. It is not easy to get a job there.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. It says so in the README.md. They were also written while the author was employed by Badoo/Bumble. I don't think this is as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments would suggest.
  - some-more-info 5y ago
    This is correct, MVIKotlin is based on Badoo's MVICore, and Decompose is a mix of Badoo's RIBs (and zsoltk's Compose-Router which is also transitively a Badoo-owned codebase).
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    >After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. Which Baboo has released under an Apache 2 license from what I can tell. Your comment makes it sound like they were proprietary libraries.
cassianoleal 5y ago
Many years ago I had a job offer at Badoo in the UK. After many rounds of going back-and-forth with the contract, me trying to better understand certain clauses, them going back to the lawyers, etc. I told them I'd be happy to sign if they removed the caluses that stated pretty much anything I created on or off hours belonged to them. They went back to the lawyers and came back to me saying that this is not the first time this has been brought up, that the contract was standard across the org and was originally written for managerial types and C-suites, and that the company had never even considered taking over an employee's off-hours work, open source or otherwise. I said good, then it should not be a problem to remove the clause. They said they would have another discussion and would really like it for me to join. I said great, then once you issue me a contract with that clause I'll be happy to join, assuming I hadn't found something else. They never came back to me. For years I wondered if anything had actually changed. Reading this tweet I'm glad I declined.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  My experience from the other side of the fence is that this is pretty standard, i.e. nobody would really bother with changing the standard contract for one potential employee unless they were perceived as a crucial asset. The people who do the hiring, the ones who make the decisions and the ones who will work with you later - these are very different groups of people, with some (very temporary) overlap. The hiring ones, just like most people, prefer to avoid unnecessary problems and additional paperwork, and move on. Mind you, if many people have the same attitude as you, the hiring people may actually make the change happen forcing the people in charge to approve a variant of the contract without that clause and offer it to the ones who complain but are otherwise excellent candidates. But this is not a quick and easy process.
  - caseymarquis 5y ago
    I would. I'd actually view someone asking for this as a positive.
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    This was the first time I actually came across a clause of this type in an employment contract. I knew of their existence but had never found them in the wild. I sincerely hope enough people refuse to sign those that it becomes a problem for companies. When I go into an employment, I'm agreeing to rent a certain number of hours of my skills to the company's benefit. I'm not agreeing to give the company any kind of control of what I do or don't do outside of those hours. Mind you, I'm not saying I would _never_ sign such a clause, but that would be a lot more expensive. I would probably agree to it if I could work 3-5 years and retire comfortably.
ytho1032 5y ago
Knowing a bit more about the background of this story, the dev conveniently left out a few details here and there which wouldn't support his story or his character. He's really not the martyr here.
rainmaking 5y ago
Well I can see that now someone has a hiring problem in the near future.
CraftingLinks 5y ago
Slavery comes in many forms
notacoward 5y ago
I worked for a company once that had this sort of "we own everything" IP clause. They tried to get me to sign it after I had already started. I crossed out that part, initialed the change, and sent it back unsigned. Ended up going back and forth a few times, and then it got dropped behind a desk or something and we all forgot about it. Not surprisingly, I suppose, that company turned out to be a bit of a mess for other reasons. When I went to leave several months later, I got a note from the CFO's admin. "We don't seem to have a copy of your employee agreement on file. Could you please sign the attached copy and return it?" Haha, no. What are they going to do, fire me? I went down and explained the situation to her, and we had a good laugh. Never did sign. All of the company's own IP turned out to be worthless BTW, and they were lucky they didn't get sued for misappropriating IP from the CTO's previous employer (DEC). Companies doing this is a huge red flag not only because of its grasping nature but because it often reveals a general kind of awfulness among its principals and/or backers.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I worked for a company once that had this sort of "we own everything" IP clause. To clarify: Bumble doesn't appear to be going after everything this developer produced while working for them. They're claiming ownership of only two specific repos, both of which even mention that they were "inspired by" Badoo/Bumble open-source projects. These two repos were developed while the developer was working for Badoo/Bumble and I assume are directly related to the type of work the developer was doing for hire. Obviously we don't have all the details, but from what I'm seeing it seems Badoo/Bumble may actually have a strong case for these repos being their property, even without weird IP assignment clauses. If either tool was used or contributed to while developing the Bumble app, it's basically no question that they have rights to it. On the other hand, if the author somehow never, ever used them as part of his dayjob and never, ever worked on them as part of his work for Bumble, the claims would be questionable.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - castrojr913 5y ago
lkramer 5y ago
In an earlier role (tech support) they had a clause like that, and I pointed it out and said I wasn't happy with that. They asked me to still start the following Monday and promised to get back to me about the contract ASAP. They never did, so I ended up working for them for 2 1/2 years without signing a contract... I guess different companies have different priorities...
kisamoto 5y ago
I think the IT industry is filled with broad, vague clauses like this that aim to lay claim to all IP an employee creates (which can include art, music etc. as well). Some employers make the excuse that it's only during office hours; others claim that this clause would "never actually be used". In my experience it is rarely removed. I've turned down jobs because of it and others that I have accepted I have been extremely worried something like this would happen. I feel for the employee in question and hope they are able to retain control of their open-source code. Maybe this bad publicity encourages others to push back in the future because I generally find this behaviour quite unacceptable.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > Some employers make the excuse that it's only during office hours; others claim that this clause would "never actually be used". If these things were true, then the employer would be perfectly fine with modifying the employment contract accordingly.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
As an employee, I’ve managed to evade these clauses by negotiating them as early as possible in the interview process. With smaller companies, it hasn’t really been as difficult as I expected. However, my local laws provide some additional protection against this type of thing. I didn’t even realize it until I consulted with a lawyer who pointed out that my state’s laws don’t allow companies to claim IP generated in off hours. Of course, consult with a lawyer to confirm which jurisdiction actually applies to your employment. As a manager on the other side of the table, I’ve had some strange experiences: On more than one occasion, employees have tried to open-source things they wrote for us without asking. Juniors especially may not fully understand the bounds of IP ownership, to the point that they think code they wrote is theirs, even if written for their job as paid works for hire. I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening here, but after seeing developers walk straight into situations where they’re releasing company code without permission I reserve judgment when I see situations like this. If these libraries were developed on company time for company work products then the developer may not have a particularly strong claim for his ownership. On the other hand, if these are entirely unreleased to his work then of course this is a ridiculous request. EDIT: A quick look at the source code suggests this situation might not be as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments here suggest. Both of the repos in question appear to be derivative works of projects that Badoo (aka Bumble, the developer's employer) owns. The MVIKotlin library opens with this statement: > This project is inspired by Badoo MVICore library. And the Decompose repo has this statement in the opening: > This project is inspired by Badoos RIBs fork of the Uber RIBs framework. And unless I'm missing something, the developer worked for Badoo (Bumble) during the entire period. It would be extremely difficult to argue that a derivative work of your employer's IP, written during your time of employment and possibly during work time, is fully independent of the company. If the developer used these projects in any way for their work at Bumble (e.g. actually using these tools or libraries as part of the app) or he used company equipment/time/resources while building them, then it would be virtually impossible to argue that these works were not partially work-for-hire as part of his employment.
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  Can you share what state law provides this protection?
barelysapient 5y ago
My solution to this is to submit an exhaustive and borderline autistic list of prior work and inventions. I’ll describe each as vaguely possible to maximize the carve out. Never had it turned down or rejected.
geofft 5y ago
If you wouldn't have written the library if it weren't for your job, and you use the library to get your job done... it doesn't really matter if it's open source. If you're in a jurisdiction and under an employment contract where your closed-source code is owned by the company, your equivalent open-source code is too. If we're talking about hobby projects, that's different, but it seems from this tweet that this is something that could have been written internally as part of someone's job and never open-sourced, right?
amanaplanablog 5y ago
I've always had a ploy I used to avoid this to a degree. When joining a company you have to fill out "prior inventions". I generally list a number of names and general vague descriptions. The catch is, none of them exist they are simply invented in my head. When building a side project I use one of the names from my prior inventions list.
btrettel 5y ago
Amusing previous HN comment on this sort of problem (not from me): > I've always thought that if a company claims rights over what you do outside worktime, they should do it not only for your genial ideas, but for the bad ones too. So, if you incur in a stupid debt it must belong to the company. Your newborn baby? The company mus pay alimony. It's all or nothing! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1113065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1113065 Edit: I found a Slashdot comment that makes the same point: > When the company has a blanket policy that takes the employee's inventions, it can come to bite them in the ass. > When I was illegally fired by Microsystems, Inc. ("MSI") they took possession of work I did on my own time using my own tools. However, on the workers comp. claim their denial was based on the claim the tendinitis was caused in part by my work at home. Either MSI fraudulently denied the workers comp. claim, or committed fraud by asserting and taking possession of the work I did on my own time. > By having a blanket policy of owning everything you do, the employer could be on the hook for everything you do. http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2667463&cid=39013649 http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2667463&cid=39013649
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I've always thought that if a company claims rights over what you do outside worktime A lot of people are assuming this was done separate from his job, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Badoo/Bumble isn't trying to claim ownership of other projects he did, just the ones that were closely related to his Badoo/Bumble work during his employment.
  - btrettel 5y ago
    Fair enough, I'm not aware of all the details of the specific case here.
- filoeleven 5y ago
  I read an apocryphal story about a guy whose manager saw him leaving and coming back during the workday, and asked later why he didn’t clock out and back in. “I was getting a haircut,” the man said. “That’s not part of your job duties here, you cannot do that on the company’s time,” replied the manager. “Why not?” said the man. “I grew most of it on the company’s time.”
activitypea 5y ago
The two repos being contested are: 1) MVIKotlin - "Extendable MVI framework [...] inspired by Badoo MVICore library" 2) Decompose - "Kotlin BLoCs [...] inspired by Badoos RIBs fork of the Uber RIBs framework" I hate corporations more than most people here, but this might be as black and white as the title and comment section imply
- yawnxyz 5y ago
  If Uber came up with it, and Badoo forked it, does it imply Uber could one day sue to own a % of Badoo/Bumble?
dbg31415 5y ago
I do all of my side work under an alias, just to keep this from happening. Making it one-step harder for lawyers is generally all it takes. Don't draw lines from your GitHub account that you use at work to the GitHub account that holds your side projects. Every time I start with a new company, I spin up a new GitHub account just for that company. Sorry this happened to you.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Despite what my contract says, if my employer asks for my personal projects, I'm quitting the same minute and we can work out the remaining details over email. I guess if they push and threaten enough I will eventually hand over the code. But in such a scenario, I'm not a loser. If I'm capable of writing software that my former company cares that much about, I'm winning. I'll hand over my Haskell code, laugh at the thought of them trying to understand it, purge all copies I posses, and immediately begin rewriting it in another language and under another anonymous profile.
Buttons840 5y ago
I've always wondered what would happen if a OSS library had accepted contributions from others? Let's say me and a friend develop a library together, then my company asks for ownership of it. Sorry, I can't legally do that, because I myself only own half the code.
hackbinary 5y ago
I would counter that this software was created and maintained on your own time, in which case that at the very least you are entitled for consideration for your work and efforts. Employment tribunals and courts take a dim view of wage theft, and that is exactly what this is if your employer is trying to enforce that clause. Get advice from an employment lawyer.
eximius 5y ago
My latest job has a somewhat reasonable set of clauses, but I still wanted some of the verbiage changed. I wasn't able to get that ("we use standardized contracts across the org"), but they were willing to give me a secondary document explaining the interpretation of the clauses I found troublesome which, to me, is really the same thing. So sometimes changing the wording isn't the only way to get your goal. Amendments/clarifications in writing can work.
Debugreality 5y ago
Generally these kinds of clauses should be viewed as red flags. I had one contract that was something like "We reserve the right to buy all IP from anything you work on while employed here for $1". I got it removed before joining but looking back it was one of the most toxic placed I'd ever worked and this was just one of a number of red flags.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  This one I’d happily sign. They reserve the right to buy, in worst case one gets compensated.
buro9 5y ago
Under UK law your employer arguably has a claim to your IP if any of the following are true: 1) They asked you to work on this as part of your employment 2) You worked on this during your employed hours 3) You worked on this on employer provided equipment If you can prove that this is an undertaking of your own (especially if it pre-dates employment) and you avoid doing any work (not even replying to Git issues) during work hours, and only ever on your own hardware... then your employer has no grounds for claim at all.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Even if your open source work is based on your employer's IP?
  - buro9 5y ago
    https://www.gov.uk/guidance/manual-of-patent-practice-mopp/section-39-right-to-employees-inventions https://www.gov.uk/guidance/manual-of-patent-practice-mopp/s... IANAL but two things would factor in: 1) Is this a traditional breach of IP law, i.e. the open source project infringing on a patent or IP of the employer? 2) Did this predate your employment and conversation to be employed? i.e. could contributing to this project constitute as furthering the employers business interest and reasonably be considered a derivative work from being employed? The latter seems to be what you're describing, and there are examples in the manual cited above. If it's a different area of work than your employer then it's of no consequence, but yes if you're using your employment to further your understanding and to make something that roughly fulfils the need - then this falls under my earlier comment of "They asked you to work on this as part of your employment" and you would likely have to give up the project.
pawelwentpawel 5y ago
Did any of you ever request an example contract that would be signed before starting to go through a marathon of interviews or even negotiating an offer? Finding a non-negotiable blanket clause like this in a contract would most probably stop me from taking the interviews or at least establish completely different salary expectations. I would understand if the work would be done on company's equipment or during some allocated time but a blanket one like this? If you're not paying me for 168 hours per week and there is no clear conflict of interest, bug off from my side projects I do in my own time.
- wackro 5y ago
  Unfortunately I can see requesting a blank contract early on in the hiring process being a huge turn off. Maybe even at any point.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
This is the infamous "shower clause" (Like they own the ideas that you come up with, in the shower). I am very glad that I never had one, with the company that employed me, for a long time.
whats-the-hype 5y ago
The internet is quick to grab the pitchfork but it looks like there's a different story here. If you compare arkann1985's MVIKotlin vs badoo/MVICore it's an understatement to say it was "inspired by". It looks like an almost identical clone. And as others have pointed out, it's not like Bumble is going after all of this guy's projects, just the ones where he was "inspired by" company work. It would be difficult to argue that the projects in question would exist without benefiting from his employment at Bumble where the originals were developed.
- asddubs 5y ago
  so? it's apache licensed, so that doesn't really change anything
  - whats-the-hype 5y ago
    It does change the perception though. Compare "This company is taking away all the great inventions this poor developer came up with" against "The company is retaining those ideas which the developer copied from them".
    - asddubs 5y ago
      if you don't want people to make open source projects based on your ideas, don't release them as open source. Bumble has just as little a right (morally speaking, not legally) to seize someones fork/inspired repo as any other open source maintainer does.
arpa 5y ago
and this is why i commit to my outside-work projects using another identity and during off work hours.
StefanoC 5y ago
Seems to me that the most important questions have barely been asked (I saw just one scrolling through that Twitter feed, unanswered): 1) Was any work done during time paid by the company? 2) Also, but I'd be flexible with this one, was work equipment used? 3) Was the developer able to produce this work thanks to what he learned from proprietary systems, at work? It's easy to grab the pitchfork, I hate that contract clause as all of you do, but without clear information on the above this case could go either way.
_6lik 5y ago
This thing has been bugging me the first time signed an employment contract years ago. So from what I understand is that everything I do on conpany property (that includes coding in a pub but on the company laptop) belongs to the company. So what I do is to first code it (any new idea that I'm working on) at home on my personal setup (including cloud an all). Then I release everything on a Apache V2 + MIT combo with CC BY SA 4 (for pics, vids etc) that I think covers everything. Then I host it under a github organisation (I am the admin of the org but the code is not hosted directly in my profile). Then I go back to the office next morning and ask one of the junior team members to fork it. In my head, I'm thinking that yeah well, I wrote something in my personal capacity somewhere and then somebody from the company forked it, so that's not my problem. So far so good... And the department is too much dependent on me so avoids any confrontation anyway. But I have always wondered, if this is fool proof? Can somebody find any loopholes in this approach and make it better...
- Mandatum 5y ago
  ... Yeah I don't understand this at all, and I'm not going to try. Ever since my employer's started putting in that IP clause I stopped writing public/open-source code.
  - _6lik 5y ago
    You can still do it in your mom's name, iykwim... but yeah such "shower clauses" are an abomination.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  IANAL, cannot comment on the legality, but as far as I’m concerned the comment about the department being too dependent on you is the most salient point of your entire post. There’s a whole universe of lawsuits and actions that can be filed and are not filed because companies calculate that they’ll extract a better return from a “live and let live” approach. There’s probably an ocean of open source that is in a work product gray area, and the companies just don’t care enough to do anything (think “I saw Alex working on a 2D physics game library after successfully deploying our latest healthcare platform feature. It will be of no use to us, and Alex is a good dev, let’s let it slide.”) A lot of copyright infringement goes un-acted on because it just doesn’t matter to the rights holders. But if they’re in a jurisdiction where they can enforce their work product agreement and then management changes, a new greedier manager might decide to claim Alex’s 2D physics engine on the almost-zero chance it becomes useful to them in the future. Probably not the smartest move, possibly a totally legal move. (But what do I know, IANAL)
neilv 5y ago
I posted an Ask HN on employee agreements ~10 months ago (for my previous startup, which was seed-ish stage), but the post got zero traction: * "Ask HN: What should early startup Employee Agreements require, and not?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26016445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26016445 If some founder wants to figure out how to do employee agreements better, they could be more equitable, and be more appealing than the scary FAANG document a hiring candidate is comparing it to.
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dehrmann 5y ago
What's the status of the license on this? The author made it Apache, but Bumble is making claims on it because of the employee's contract. It wasn't the employee's to release in the first place (as per the contract), but once it's out there, did the employee essentially open source it as an rogue agent of the company? At the same time, a Microsoft employee can't open source Windows and just say "oops." As a developer using open source code, how can you ever have enough certainty that an open source project won't run into issues like this?
rootusrootus 5y ago
On a related note, always be careful to look at the documents that come with things like stock grants that you may receive in addition to salary. There is frequently this same kind of legal language there which may not have been in the original employment contract you signed. My current company operates this way. The employment contract was pretty generic and didn't really have much IP-related language in it. But the first stock grant had a document that was quite a lot more specific. Fortunately nothing as onerous as described in this Twitter post, but still, it was good that I read all the documents before accepting the grant.
ToddWBurgess 5y ago
I know from talking to an IP lawyer, IP law has less to do with who is right and more about who has the deep pockets to afford an IP dispute.
Clubber 5y ago
Spolsky wrote a pretty good article on this very thing. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
anonymousiam 5y ago
I signed away all IP rights to Teledyne (my second job) in 1980. I've worked for three companies since then, and never had to sign anything like that. I'm pretty sure it's unenforceable, but the thing I signed basically said that anything I invent from that point forward, even after leaving Teledyne, would belong to them.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Doesn’t that open up a chance of lawsuits with all your other employers?
beervirus 5y ago
> I will need to fork repos to continue my work. Uhhhh… if the employer owns it, it presumably isn’t going to be licensed as open source.
aaron695 5y ago
I would think you personally could be sued by people who contribute to your open-source libs that you don't own. Your employer owns your code and IP, including on your own time, you can't siphon off their IP from the workplace to yourself through your clever loophole of it's my time and equipment. This is not rocket science... and lot's of companies will allow you to work on your own stuff, just get it in writing, else they own it, or you have to go to court to prove it's not their IP, what a pain, multidisciplinary is a thing, it's not as simple as it's a different topic to my company. So you have no right to open source their code. So you are misleading other people who contribute to your 'fake' open source code. That's fraud and you are not on their time, so it's personal.
game_the0ry 5y ago
The repos in question have Apache licenses, v2.0. What is stopping me from cloning and pushing both to my own public github repo, with the same license?
eterevsky 5y ago
There was a discussion about a similar clause in employee contracts with Google Switzerland. Turns out such conditions are illegal according to Swiss law, and the clause was dropped.
yawnxyz 5y ago
I have a slightly unrelated question and I'm in need of advice: I'm about to work on a grant, with another PI at University of Sydney for a project we've worked on for four years. This grant is to advance our mission of building software system for supporting personalized bacteriophage therapy. Essentially, we're building software to make personalized therapy possible in this space, so we're building something critical for the project. We're building the software to get funding to "phase 2" which is 50x (8 figures) the amount of money the grant's already received. Currently we're employed on the project as contract researchers, but we (and our PI) wants us there in Australia in person. Since we're based in the US/Can, we need to get work visas, which require us to be employed by the grant directly. My question is: we have to sign employment agreements for the university, and our contracts look very much like the "we'll take everything you own, including your ideas you came up with in your shower at your own home" kind of contracts. We've already pushed back and laid out our position — we want to be able to continue building this project past the length of employment and past Phase 2, whether we get it or not. I don't really care if they get full, perpetual license to whatever I create there; it's most likely going to be OSS anyway. I just don't want them to prevent us from using it or OSS-ing it in the future. Has anyone else dealt with universities and institutions in this manner? Do they usually operate like companies in this way?
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Sounds like a tricky situation with respect to the visa. In my experience, it is pretty common for universities to operate in this way. The default position from legal teams ( uni or corporate) will always be to own everything.
RamblingCTO 5y ago
IANAL but I think at least in Germany that doesn't hold in court. I'm surprised by what (not specific to bumble) US companies get away with and that people can basically sell their lives.
questiondev 5y ago
never worked for a tech company outside of projects or contracts i’ve done for people i know and my own ventures (small ventures), i’ve coded since i was 9 years old, started out in BASIC then took up pascal but now code (or script) javascript/react and have been looking into firms to work for, the stuff that was brought up to me made me feel like i have to protect my off the clock source code. the only reason why i was looking into working for someone else was to raise enough money to finish bootstrapping an unrelated startup. looks like my fears are valid
bicepjai 5y ago
I can’t see the tweet. Ant links or images ?
michael7463 5y ago
Since the original tweet is deleted, here is an archived copy: https://archive.md/NvaFR https://archive.md/NvaFR

605 points by giansegato 5y ago

I note that Software Freedom Conservancy advocates renegotiating your contract to retain ownership of code you write for open source projects you work on: https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/

game_the0ry 5y ago

UPDATE - twitter/@arkann1985 was just hired by Google [1]. Well done, Arkaddii, and fuck you to Bumble. [1] https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1467914399381925888 https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1467914399381925888

DoingIsLearning 5y ago

I am almost certain that IP law overrides and voids any abusive contract in the UK. Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.

Silhouette 5y ago
Why do you believe that? There is specific wording that is customary to use in an employment contract in at least England and Wales (along the lines of "work done in the course of your employment") if that sort of agreement is intended. It would typically cover work done on employer time, using the employer's resources, or in a field related to working for the employer, and you have to be careful about how broadly the latter can be interpreted in the context of the rest of the contract. It is also sadly not unusual for employers to seek IP rights to all creative work done by a salaried employee during their term of employment as an explicit provision of the employment contract. Most of us here might consider that abusive but it might remove ambiguity and put the employer on safer ground legally in the event of a later dispute, and lawyers gonna lawyer. I have argued before that an employee should reject that kind of excessively broad term and if working in a creative industry like software development they should seriously consider whether they really want to work for that employer if the employer is unwilling to change to the more customary contractual agreement when it is challenged. But a lot of people just sign contracts without reading them and unfortunately OP may be in trouble here if that is what they did. If the employment contract contains no IP clauses that make the agreement explicit then maybe the course of employment rule would be the default but this would be very unlikely for anyone working in a creative industry and OP's description suggests there is specific wording being cited in this case. I am not a lawyer. The understanding above does come from discussing this issue with real lawyers in England more than once, but not since a few years ago. As always, get your legal advice from a real lawyer if it matters and not from some random HN comment.
- boudin 5y ago
  This sounds lile really greay areas though. Can an employer claim the work of something done outside of work (as in paid) hours? If the employer didn't retribute this time in the first place, can it be considered as being in the "course of the employment"? This seems that if this kind of super generic statement will always go in the way of the employer, it would be a giant loophole to go any regulation on working hours. In this specific case though we don't really know the details and maybe some of the work was done during working hours.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    There might also be a clause in a salaried employee's contract that specifically requires them to notify the employer of any other work they are doing and get permission, precisely because otherwise the employer could end up in trouble under working time rules through no fault of their own. As I understand it, this area can get very tricky because you have several general positions in law here that might be in conflict. For example, normally restraint of trade is not allowed, but there is also an implicit condition in any employment contract that the employee will properly serve their employer and that might include not doing other things that would interfere with their responsibilities as an employee. Then there is the whole question of whether work can be done off the clock for a salaried employee given there are limits on working hours and minimum wage requirements (though the latter probably won't be a relevant factor for anyone writing software). There have been related questions about people who are on call and they can get messy so it is not hard to imagine a case about IP rights getting messy with similar arguments being made by both sides. Again, what OP needs here is a real employment lawyer. Without seeing the contract and other relevant information the most we can do is discuss the general issues, and even then and when this information all came from real lawyers, I am still cautious because my knowledge might be out of date or there might be other relevant factors we didn't discuss.
    - boudin 5y ago
      It's definitely something really complex. My contract does have a clause requiring me to notify them about side activities. It's a small company and, from what I gathered when I discussed the contract with the founder back then, a lawyer advised him to add this clause to protect the company indeed. My advise to any company that is thinking to do the same thing that this one did to this developer, if you're interested by the open source projects of one of your employee, sponsor it, give time to your employee to contribute in his/her working hours for example. You'll have a much better outcome.
gorgoiler 5y ago
UK law is pretty clear: if you are a contractor then you own everything you create, but if you are a salaried employee (”work for hire”) then your employer owns everything you create that’s related to the business. If you write Perl for a bank they don’t own the songs you compose in the shower (they afe outside the ”scope of employment”.) They probably own your money manager side project though. “Probably” here means, as always, “has a good chance of winning at tribunal” rather than any defensible logical meaning.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  The default position might be something like that but anyone writing software professionally surely has explicit provisions in their employment contract that would take precedence (as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course).
  - ajb 5y ago
    Contacts don't override every law. Ever heard of inalienable rights? Those are ones that you can't contact away.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      Which "inalienable right" applies here?
      - ajb 5y ago
        In fact in the UK I think you are right, my apologies. It's California where the Labour code protects inventions made in the employees own time: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=2870 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course Which they don't because it makes no sense. Transpose to a car mechanic fixing up junkers in their spare time, does the fixed junker belong to the company? Of course not.

turbinerneiter 5y ago

Bumble has a wave of abuse incoming. Everyone checking their Twitter account will see a stream of wokeness and be triggered by the discrepancy to their petty evil behaviour. This kind of ignorance is and should be pretty damaging to their brand, although I already sympathize with their poor social media workers who will have to deal with the onslaught.

geewee 5y ago
What does "a stream of wokeness" mean?
- mellosouls 5y ago
  Presumably it means they are obnoxiously pious.
- onemiketwelve 5y ago
  It means they're about to get a butt load of criticism and I'm an asshole
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    Are you calling me an asshole? For what?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  It means that every one of their tweets is about a woke topic. Don't shoot the messenger. It's not my fault that the term was transformed into a toxic ridicule by the right. When in first learned the term it was in connection with conscious rap and meant people who think and consider important social issues. Now it's apperantly right wing hate speech.

kgeist 5y ago

Here in Russia Rambler tried to do the same with nginx, and they failed to achieve their goals. I don't know, it creates nothing but bad publicity without giving anything in return considering they won't maintain it anyway if the core devs leave (and nothing stops them from forking and creating their commercial solution right now). The image of Rambler before: "Igor Sysoev created nginx while working at Rambler" (positive association). The image now: "Igor Sysoev created nginx in his spare time and he just happened to work for Rambler at the time and Rambler tried to take away his project by SWATing their office". It's like some pointless greed ("it's mine!!") above all pragmatism.

ainar-g 5y ago
It seems like at a certain level, when a company achieves an unfortunate combination of buttloads of money and incompetent leadership, that company starts to think that it is above puny human concepts like reputation. Compare it with the behaviour of A Certain Database Company, Whose Name Is Similar To “Oral Care”.
- znpy 5y ago
  I know a company whose name is similar to that, and many people say claim that company has no customers, only hostages.
noduerme 5y ago
I don't know how copyright laws work in Russia, but it's a bit of a gray area in America when you write code for someone unless it's explicitly spelled out in the contract. The end product (compiled binary or whatever they're paying for to "just work") belongs to them, but the source code does not belong to them unless it's explicitly stated in a work-for-hire contract that all of your intellectual property goes to them while you're hired. I always make it clear in my contracts that I am not re-selling rights to anything I build that's derived from FOSS or, even my own code if it's part of my own open source projects; the client cannot own something that is not for sale, just by hiring me on an hourly basis. I make sure to communicate that with them verbally as well beforehand, in case they mistakenly have the idea that they are buying the rights to something that I can't legally sell them. Usually I present them a list of modules and files that will be used in their project which (a) are FOSS, (b) belong to me, and (c) which I will write for them that they can reuse/rewrite/resell the source code for.

DarthNebo 5y ago

GitHub should try to enable some sort of toggled anonymous mode for select repos, while users should make their FOSS/social identities less obvious or decoupled if their employers aren't that friendly with such clauses. With remote work becoming more pervasive, employees should really not be doing any personal things on work computers because their traffic is definitely going to be analysed by someone or some system. Just a general reminder as well - Companies/Govt's would absolutely love for GitHub/Gitlab or any social platform to require ID card verification for users if that was on the table.

gmueckl 5y ago
Such an anonymous mode would be damaging for GitHub because it needs to stay friendly with its commercial and corporate customers. Besides, such a mode only provides obfuscation, but no legal protection at all. In fact, lawyers would turn it around and claim that using that mode showed that the owner of a repo was aware that what they were doing was wrong. Your idea would have a better chance of success as a separate platform dedicated to anonymous code hosting. But that in turn would likely attract bad actors, as usual.
- wruza 5y ago
  lawyers would turn it around and claim that using that mode showed that the owner of a repo was aware that what they were doing was wrong Can’t you turn it around and claim that it was done to reduce the possibility of debating with idiots who like to unreasonably turn things around by blah blahing all possible and impossible versions out of thin air?
- DarthNebo 5y ago
  I meant someway for the repo to exist without coming under a specific individual, like an organisation would make more sense instead of having repos under your public profile. But then again the user has to be careful with their email addresses with every commit.

swiftcoder 5y ago

Assuming for the moment that their claim is legally sound, what are the practical implications? The code is already published under an open-source license, with multiple other contributors to which they don't have an employment relationship... Ownership would allow them to relicense the employees original contributions, but they'd still need to negotiate with or replace all code by other contributors, and they can't un-opensource the existing codebase, right?

Silhouette 5y ago
If the copyright has always belonged to the employer then OP never had the legal ability to license it as open source in the first place. The employer could presumably shut the whole project down and in theory even go after others for copyright infringement retrospectively. If there have been other contributors then the employer would not magically get the copyright to those contributions though, which could leave the whole project in limbo with no-one having enough rights to continue working on it and releasing the results.
davidgerard 5y ago
They want the official repo.

pjc50 5y ago

Check. Your. Contracts. It is risky to do open source work without having a written agreement with your employer that exempts it.

dmos62 5y ago
Should your work in spare time be explicitly exempt in the contract, or, if side projects are not mentioned in the contract, does that implicitly exempt it?
- em-bee 5y ago
  depends on the country where you work. i believe in the US it is generally assumed that everything you do belongs to the employer even if not specifically mentioned. in some countries it is restricted to work done during work hours or on company equipment. in those countries it is safe if you work at home on your own computer, at least if the contract doesn't mention anything to the contrary. if the contract does claim personal work then it depends on whether that is legal or not.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    > i believe in the US it is generally assumed that everything you do belongs to the employer even if not specifically mentioned. https://store.legal.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/news-views/corporate-counsel/employer-and-employee-ownership-of-intellectual-property-not-as-easy-as-you-think https://store.legal.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/news-vie...
elric 5y ago
Read the contract before you sign it. Don't work for companies that include any clauses what you can or cannot do in your free time (excluding reasonable exceptions, such as not directly competing with $employer). This sort of greed/zealotry on the side of employers is why some FOSS projects are such a pain to contribute to (i.e. anything that's part of the Eclipse Foundation). You pretty much have to sign your name in blood on a contributor agreement, and you may even have to get your employer to sign it too. This is madness. Slavery is not a thing. Employers do not own us.

greatgib 5y ago

Here the question is even a little bit more interesting than just the "open source" code you created I think: There is lot of discussion about the ownership of the code, but what about the other things related to the project? Like stars and issues. In no way stars and issues belongs to the company, they belongs to each user that submitted them. They submitted them to the project that was on a specific username. So, I'm not sure that the company could legally ask to take over that by force without the user agreeing. Imagine if a company ask that "you transfer your likes to us"...

ainar-g 5y ago
An interesting related question I've always had is what even counts as a contribution. For example, consider the three situations: (a) I open an issue about a feature not working. E.g.: “When I press the button, the app crashes”. (b) Same as (a), but I also point out the place in the code where the error is without providing any code to fix it. E.g. “When I press the button, the app crashes, and I think that it has to do with a null pointer dereference in function pkg.foo()”. (c) Same as (b), but I also provide a simple diff to fix it, but not a formally submitted merge/pull request. The (c) sounds close enough to a contribution but not quite. And I'm not sure about (a) and (b).
- dmurray 5y ago
  I think there's a clear distinction in most jurisdictions between (c) and the other two. Let's suppose this bug report really was written on company time, with company equipment, related to the company's business, so we don't have to argue about how far-reaching your employer's rights should be here. In (a) and (b), you've provided services to the code maintainers. Perhaps your employment contract forbids you from doing that, just as it might prohibit you doing project management or fixing their plumbing. But the recipient of those services hasn't done anything wrong. In (c) you've additionally created intellectual property, to which you have some rights, including copyright. The code maintainers can't use that code in their product unless you assign them certain of those rights (or unless they can avail of other exemptions like fair use). But those rights might not be yours to assign - they might be your employer's. In addition to you potentially breaking your agreement with your employer, anyone republishing this code may be infringing your employer's IP rights (maybe under good faith, maybe you indemnified them... But still your employer has a legitimate complaint).

mellosouls 5y ago

I don't know the history of the development, and I'm instinctively against overreach by employers but considering both repos are clearly influenced by repos on similar platforms (eg Badoo), it doesn't seem unreasonable for Bumble to at least take an interest in their provenance and - if they have been developed on company time and equipment - their ownership.

qwertyboi 5y ago
Practically speaking, Badoo/Bumble doesn't go after EVERY OSS project written by an employee. MVIKotlin is conceptually the same as badoo/MVICore, and even Decompose is conceptually the same as badoo/ribs. If these projects are "eerily similar" and both were written on company time, the official variants (MVICore, RIBs) having been written by dedicated teams while the other two (MVIKotlin, Decompose) written in rogue, then what do you do? P.S.: Badoo and Bumble have the same owner, so "influenced by Badoo" is the same as "influenced by Bumble".
StrLght 5y ago
JFYI: Bumble and Badoo are the same company.
- mellosouls 5y ago
  Thanks, I didn't know that, but I think it reinforces the point.

buzzwords 5y ago

Does anyone know what is the rational for Bumble to do this?

dvhh 5y ago
It will be something that we might never know Maybe juste to spite a leaving employee.
- buzzwords 5y ago
  That's the worst part of it. The move has very little benefit for them.
  - danschuller 5y ago
    It's massively negative. Like the US, software developers are in massive demand in the UK. If you see this story, are you going to bother going through the interview process here, or apply to any of the hundreds of other companies that haven't publicly demonstrated terrible leadership.
some-more-info 5y ago
The rationale is that what other people here are saying - that Bumble (Badoo) should have paid them on company time to contribute to open-source - was already happening. Bumble owns under the Badoo repository two projects, called badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs. These libraries are developed on company time by employees, as open-source. If you check MVIKotlin and Decompose, you'll see that they're conceptually equivalent. You could therefore argue it is, in fact, using company resources. But badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs are the two official frameworks written and released by Badoo. Then, what is MVIKotlin and Decompose, and does Badoo own the rights to it - if it was developed on company time, based on pre-existing source code owned by the company?
- bluesign 5y ago
  yeah both MVIKotlin and Decompose says they are inspired by badoo/MVI-Core and badoo/RIBs.

_odey 5y ago

I've asked this before and never got a straight answer, but I'll ask again: what exact clauses do I need to modify in the employment contract, and what exactly must they say, in order to avoid this sort of situation? (relevant to UK employment that is). If you've solved this for yourself, please tell us all how and what it's written in yours so we can do the same. Here is a link to what my previous employment contract stated about copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24220800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24220800 (right now I'm just a shareholder in a company and not employed). Basically it says employer owns all, and I'd like that to say something else... but what?

bsenftner 5y ago
Believe it or not, this actually works: bring your attorney with you to the interview, and accept no interview less than product lead. Basically, it's an arms race currently using guns, and the majority of the dumb ass developers show up with knives.
- larsrc 5y ago
  If you're in a union, bring a union lawyer. If you're not, well, this is why you might want to be.
andi999 5y ago
Talk to a work contract specialized lawyer. Even apart from this issue, there might be other issues in the contract, so why not alway talk to one before signing.
- _odey 5y ago
  I would like to see something that already exists and was used successfully first, so I don't go and talk to one empty handed... It's one thing to say: "I'd like to keep ownership of code I write on my free time" and another to add "like all these others do so already" to that statement. Maybe I could try emailing the FSF and asking for hints, as I'm registered with them to be able to contribute to emacs, and actually need to inform them about employment contracts changes and things like this in general. But still, there must exist somebody, somewhere, that has something reasonable written in their employment contract we could use as reference.

justshowpost 5y ago

Just imagine you hiring someone just to play with his Ruby pet projects all day long...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

joeyh 5y ago

Nothing in the APL requires he transfer the git repos to them. If they own the license, he needs to update the license and copyright statements to match reality, maybe send them a courtesy copy in a tarball or whatever. That's all. Copyight cannot demand this ridiculous thing.

tyingq 5y ago
I would guess their position would be that they owned the code/copyright from the very outset, and didn't approve applying the APL to it. The license they want to use might be one that forbids posting the source code.

quiffledwerg 5y ago

Bumble gave him a cake for five years service recently, so the company can’t be that bad really. https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1446071099989663745?s=21 https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1446071099989663745?s=... Surely we can overlook the whole “give us your damn open source personal projects copyright grab or you’ll be chewing on big legal problems buddy” thing given the companies generosity with cake? The cake shows that Bumble really are good people. Reminds me of those famous words “speak softly and carry a big cake”.

Kalium 5y ago
The thing about companies past a fairly small size is that you cannot reason about them as a group with characteristics much beyond sharing an employer. Are they good people? Yes. Are they bad people? Yes. Are they vindictive, legalistic people? Yes. With this in mind, I would say that the cake shows that some part of the org is good people. We might consider being careful about how quickly and how aggressively we generalize this. I know where I've been in companies where parts of engineering were good people while other parts of the company had wonderful and bountiful opportunities to become good people.
snthd 5y ago
They're just fans of portal.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  "This was a triumph..."

marcinzm 5y ago

A note to Bumble, this makes me not want to work for you or anyone who is currently in a related leadership position at Bumble (ie: eng leadership, etc.). Given the lack of supply in engineering the bad publicity is going to cost you more than any miniscule gain. edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.

throwaway984393 5y ago
Same. They'll never hire good coders this way.
- AndrewSChapman 5y ago
  There are plenty of excellent engineers at Bumble. It is not easy to get a job there.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. It says so in the README.md. They were also written while the author was employed by Badoo/Bumble. I don't think this is as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments would suggest.
- some-more-info 5y ago
  This is correct, MVIKotlin is based on Badoo's MVICore, and Decompose is a mix of Badoo's RIBs (and zsoltk's Compose-Router which is also transitively a Badoo-owned codebase).
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. Which Baboo has released under an Apache 2 license from what I can tell. Your comment makes it sound like they were proprietary libraries.

cassianoleal 5y ago

Many years ago I had a job offer at Badoo in the UK. After many rounds of going back-and-forth with the contract, me trying to better understand certain clauses, them going back to the lawyers, etc. I told them I'd be happy to sign if they removed the caluses that stated pretty much anything I created on or off hours belonged to them. They went back to the lawyers and came back to me saying that this is not the first time this has been brought up, that the contract was standard across the org and was originally written for managerial types and C-suites, and that the company had never even considered taking over an employee's off-hours work, open source or otherwise. I said good, then it should not be a problem to remove the clause. They said they would have another discussion and would really like it for me to join. I said great, then once you issue me a contract with that clause I'll be happy to join, assuming I hadn't found something else. They never came back to me. For years I wondered if anything had actually changed. Reading this tweet I'm glad I declined.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
My experience from the other side of the fence is that this is pretty standard, i.e. nobody would really bother with changing the standard contract for one potential employee unless they were perceived as a crucial asset. The people who do the hiring, the ones who make the decisions and the ones who will work with you later - these are very different groups of people, with some (very temporary) overlap. The hiring ones, just like most people, prefer to avoid unnecessary problems and additional paperwork, and move on. Mind you, if many people have the same attitude as you, the hiring people may actually make the change happen forcing the people in charge to approve a variant of the contract without that clause and offer it to the ones who complain but are otherwise excellent candidates. But this is not a quick and easy process.
- caseymarquis 5y ago
  I would. I'd actually view someone asking for this as a positive.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  This was the first time I actually came across a clause of this type in an employment contract. I knew of their existence but had never found them in the wild. I sincerely hope enough people refuse to sign those that it becomes a problem for companies. When I go into an employment, I'm agreeing to rent a certain number of hours of my skills to the company's benefit. I'm not agreeing to give the company any kind of control of what I do or don't do outside of those hours. Mind you, I'm not saying I would _never_ sign such a clause, but that would be a lot more expensive. I would probably agree to it if I could work 3-5 years and retire comfortably.

ytho1032 5y ago

Knowing a bit more about the background of this story, the dev conveniently left out a few details here and there which wouldn't support his story or his character. He's really not the martyr here.

rainmaking 5y ago

Well I can see that now someone has a hiring problem in the near future.

CraftingLinks 5y ago

Slavery comes in many forms

notacoward 5y ago

I worked for a company once that had this sort of "we own everything" IP clause. They tried to get me to sign it after I had already started. I crossed out that part, initialed the change, and sent it back unsigned. Ended up going back and forth a few times, and then it got dropped behind a desk or something and we all forgot about it. Not surprisingly, I suppose, that company turned out to be a bit of a mess for other reasons. When I went to leave several months later, I got a note from the CFO's admin. "We don't seem to have a copy of your employee agreement on file. Could you please sign the attached copy and return it?" Haha, no. What are they going to do, fire me? I went down and explained the situation to her, and we had a good laugh. Never did sign. All of the company's own IP turned out to be worthless BTW, and they were lucky they didn't get sued for misappropriating IP from the CTO's previous employer (DEC). Companies doing this is a huge red flag not only because of its grasping nature but because it often reveals a general kind of awfulness among its principals and/or backers.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I worked for a company once that had this sort of "we own everything" IP clause. To clarify: Bumble doesn't appear to be going after everything this developer produced while working for them. They're claiming ownership of only two specific repos, both of which even mention that they were "inspired by" Badoo/Bumble open-source projects. These two repos were developed while the developer was working for Badoo/Bumble and I assume are directly related to the type of work the developer was doing for hire. Obviously we don't have all the details, but from what I'm seeing it seems Badoo/Bumble may actually have a strong case for these repos being their property, even without weird IP assignment clauses. If either tool was used or contributed to while developing the Bumble app, it's basically no question that they have rights to it. On the other hand, if the author somehow never, ever used them as part of his dayjob and never, ever worked on them as part of his work for Bumble, the claims would be questionable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- castrojr913 5y ago

lkramer 5y ago

In an earlier role (tech support) they had a clause like that, and I pointed it out and said I wasn't happy with that. They asked me to still start the following Monday and promised to get back to me about the contract ASAP. They never did, so I ended up working for them for 2 1/2 years without signing a contract... I guess different companies have different priorities...

kisamoto 5y ago

I think the IT industry is filled with broad, vague clauses like this that aim to lay claim to all IP an employee creates (which can include art, music etc. as well). Some employers make the excuse that it's only during office hours; others claim that this clause would "never actually be used". In my experience it is rarely removed. I've turned down jobs because of it and others that I have accepted I have been extremely worried something like this would happen. I feel for the employee in question and hope they are able to retain control of their open-source code. Maybe this bad publicity encourages others to push back in the future because I generally find this behaviour quite unacceptable.

josephcsible 5y ago
> Some employers make the excuse that it's only during office hours; others claim that this clause would "never actually be used". If these things were true, then the employer would be perfectly fine with modifying the employment contract accordingly.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

As an employee, I’ve managed to evade these clauses by negotiating them as early as possible in the interview process. With smaller companies, it hasn’t really been as difficult as I expected. However, my local laws provide some additional protection against this type of thing. I didn’t even realize it until I consulted with a lawyer who pointed out that my state’s laws don’t allow companies to claim IP generated in off hours. Of course, consult with a lawyer to confirm which jurisdiction actually applies to your employment. As a manager on the other side of the table, I’ve had some strange experiences: On more than one occasion, employees have tried to open-source things they wrote for us without asking. Juniors especially may not fully understand the bounds of IP ownership, to the point that they think code they wrote is theirs, even if written for their job as paid works for hire. I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening here, but after seeing developers walk straight into situations where they’re releasing company code without permission I reserve judgment when I see situations like this. If these libraries were developed on company time for company work products then the developer may not have a particularly strong claim for his ownership. On the other hand, if these are entirely unreleased to his work then of course this is a ridiculous request. EDIT: A quick look at the source code suggests this situation might not be as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments here suggest. Both of the repos in question appear to be derivative works of projects that Badoo (aka Bumble, the developer's employer) owns. The MVIKotlin library opens with this statement: > This project is inspired by Badoo MVICore library. And the Decompose repo has this statement in the opening: > This project is inspired by Badoos RIBs fork of the Uber RIBs framework. And unless I'm missing something, the developer worked for Badoo (Bumble) during the entire period. It would be extremely difficult to argue that a derivative work of your employer's IP, written during your time of employment and possibly during work time, is fully independent of the company. If the developer used these projects in any way for their work at Bumble (e.g. actually using these tools or libraries as part of the app) or he used company equipment/time/resources while building them, then it would be virtually impossible to argue that these works were not partially work-for-hire as part of his employment.

1MachineElf 5y ago
Can you share what state law provides this protection?

barelysapient 5y ago

My solution to this is to submit an exhaustive and borderline autistic list of prior work and inventions. I’ll describe each as vaguely possible to maximize the carve out. Never had it turned down or rejected.

geofft 5y ago

If you wouldn't have written the library if it weren't for your job, and you use the library to get your job done... it doesn't really matter if it's open source. If you're in a jurisdiction and under an employment contract where your closed-source code is owned by the company, your equivalent open-source code is too. If we're talking about hobby projects, that's different, but it seems from this tweet that this is something that could have been written internally as part of someone's job and never open-sourced, right?

amanaplanablog 5y ago

I've always had a ploy I used to avoid this to a degree. When joining a company you have to fill out "prior inventions". I generally list a number of names and general vague descriptions. The catch is, none of them exist they are simply invented in my head. When building a side project I use one of the names from my prior inventions list.

btrettel 5y ago

Amusing previous HN comment on this sort of problem (not from me): > I've always thought that if a company claims rights over what you do outside worktime, they should do it not only for your genial ideas, but for the bad ones too. So, if you incur in a stupid debt it must belong to the company. Your newborn baby? The company mus pay alimony. It's all or nothing! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1113065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1113065 Edit: I found a Slashdot comment that makes the same point: > When the company has a blanket policy that takes the employee's inventions, it can come to bite them in the ass. > When I was illegally fired by Microsystems, Inc. ("MSI") they took possession of work I did on my own time using my own tools. However, on the workers comp. claim their denial was based on the claim the tendinitis was caused in part by my work at home. Either MSI fraudulently denied the workers comp. claim, or committed fraud by asserting and taking possession of the work I did on my own time. > By having a blanket policy of owning everything you do, the employer could be on the hook for everything you do. http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2667463&cid=39013649 http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2667463&cid=39013649

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I've always thought that if a company claims rights over what you do outside worktime A lot of people are assuming this was done separate from his job, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Badoo/Bumble isn't trying to claim ownership of other projects he did, just the ones that were closely related to his Badoo/Bumble work during his employment.
- btrettel 5y ago
  Fair enough, I'm not aware of all the details of the specific case here.
filoeleven 5y ago
I read an apocryphal story about a guy whose manager saw him leaving and coming back during the workday, and asked later why he didn’t clock out and back in. “I was getting a haircut,” the man said. “That’s not part of your job duties here, you cannot do that on the company’s time,” replied the manager. “Why not?” said the man. “I grew most of it on the company’s time.”

activitypea 5y ago

The two repos being contested are: 1) MVIKotlin - "Extendable MVI framework [...] inspired by Badoo MVICore library" 2) Decompose - "Kotlin BLoCs [...] inspired by Badoos RIBs fork of the Uber RIBs framework" I hate corporations more than most people here, but this might be as black and white as the title and comment section imply

yawnxyz 5y ago
If Uber came up with it, and Badoo forked it, does it imply Uber could one day sue to own a % of Badoo/Bumble?

dbg31415 5y ago

I do all of my side work under an alias, just to keep this from happening. Making it one-step harder for lawyers is generally all it takes. Don't draw lines from your GitHub account that you use at work to the GitHub account that holds your side projects. Every time I start with a new company, I spin up a new GitHub account just for that company. Sorry this happened to you.

Buttons840 5y ago
Despite what my contract says, if my employer asks for my personal projects, I'm quitting the same minute and we can work out the remaining details over email. I guess if they push and threaten enough I will eventually hand over the code. But in such a scenario, I'm not a loser. If I'm capable of writing software that my former company cares that much about, I'm winning. I'll hand over my Haskell code, laugh at the thought of them trying to understand it, purge all copies I posses, and immediately begin rewriting it in another language and under another anonymous profile.

Buttons840 5y ago

I've always wondered what would happen if a OSS library had accepted contributions from others? Let's say me and a friend develop a library together, then my company asks for ownership of it. Sorry, I can't legally do that, because I myself only own half the code.

hackbinary 5y ago

I would counter that this software was created and maintained on your own time, in which case that at the very least you are entitled for consideration for your work and efforts. Employment tribunals and courts take a dim view of wage theft, and that is exactly what this is if your employer is trying to enforce that clause. Get advice from an employment lawyer.

eximius 5y ago

My latest job has a somewhat reasonable set of clauses, but I still wanted some of the verbiage changed. I wasn't able to get that ("we use standardized contracts across the org"), but they were willing to give me a secondary document explaining the interpretation of the clauses I found troublesome which, to me, is really the same thing. So sometimes changing the wording isn't the only way to get your goal. Amendments/clarifications in writing can work.

Debugreality 5y ago

Generally these kinds of clauses should be viewed as red flags. I had one contract that was something like "We reserve the right to buy all IP from anything you work on while employed here for $1". I got it removed before joining but looking back it was one of the most toxic placed I'd ever worked and this was just one of a number of red flags.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
This one I’d happily sign. They reserve the right to buy, in worst case one gets compensated.

buro9 5y ago

Under UK law your employer arguably has a claim to your IP if any of the following are true: 1) They asked you to work on this as part of your employment 2) You worked on this during your employed hours 3) You worked on this on employer provided equipment If you can prove that this is an undertaking of your own (especially if it pre-dates employment) and you avoid doing any work (not even replying to Git issues) during work hours, and only ever on your own hardware... then your employer has no grounds for claim at all.

Rebelgecko 5y ago
Even if your open source work is based on your employer's IP?
- buro9 5y ago
  https://www.gov.uk/guidance/manual-of-patent-practice-mopp/section-39-right-to-employees-inventions https://www.gov.uk/guidance/manual-of-patent-practice-mopp/s... IANAL but two things would factor in: 1) Is this a traditional breach of IP law, i.e. the open source project infringing on a patent or IP of the employer? 2) Did this predate your employment and conversation to be employed? i.e. could contributing to this project constitute as furthering the employers business interest and reasonably be considered a derivative work from being employed? The latter seems to be what you're describing, and there are examples in the manual cited above. If it's a different area of work than your employer then it's of no consequence, but yes if you're using your employment to further your understanding and to make something that roughly fulfils the need - then this falls under my earlier comment of "They asked you to work on this as part of your employment" and you would likely have to give up the project.

pawelwentpawel 5y ago

Did any of you ever request an example contract that would be signed before starting to go through a marathon of interviews or even negotiating an offer? Finding a non-negotiable blanket clause like this in a contract would most probably stop me from taking the interviews or at least establish completely different salary expectations. I would understand if the work would be done on company's equipment or during some allocated time but a blanket one like this? If you're not paying me for 168 hours per week and there is no clear conflict of interest, bug off from my side projects I do in my own time.

wackro 5y ago
Unfortunately I can see requesting a blank contract early on in the hiring process being a huge turn off. Maybe even at any point.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

This is the infamous "shower clause" (Like they own the ideas that you come up with, in the shower). I am very glad that I never had one, with the company that employed me, for a long time.

whats-the-hype 5y ago

The internet is quick to grab the pitchfork but it looks like there's a different story here. If you compare arkann1985's MVIKotlin vs badoo/MVICore it's an understatement to say it was "inspired by". It looks like an almost identical clone. And as others have pointed out, it's not like Bumble is going after all of this guy's projects, just the ones where he was "inspired by" company work. It would be difficult to argue that the projects in question would exist without benefiting from his employment at Bumble where the originals were developed.

asddubs 5y ago
so? it's apache licensed, so that doesn't really change anything
- whats-the-hype 5y ago
  It does change the perception though. Compare "This company is taking away all the great inventions this poor developer came up with" against "The company is retaining those ideas which the developer copied from them".
  - asddubs 5y ago
    if you don't want people to make open source projects based on your ideas, don't release them as open source. Bumble has just as little a right (morally speaking, not legally) to seize someones fork/inspired repo as any other open source maintainer does.

arpa 5y ago

and this is why i commit to my outside-work projects using another identity and during off work hours.

StefanoC 5y ago

Seems to me that the most important questions have barely been asked (I saw just one scrolling through that Twitter feed, unanswered): 1) Was any work done during time paid by the company? 2) Also, but I'd be flexible with this one, was work equipment used? 3) Was the developer able to produce this work thanks to what he learned from proprietary systems, at work? It's easy to grab the pitchfork, I hate that contract clause as all of you do, but without clear information on the above this case could go either way.

_6lik 5y ago

This thing has been bugging me the first time signed an employment contract years ago. So from what I understand is that everything I do on conpany property (that includes coding in a pub but on the company laptop) belongs to the company. So what I do is to first code it (any new idea that I'm working on) at home on my personal setup (including cloud an all). Then I release everything on a Apache V2 + MIT combo with CC BY SA 4 (for pics, vids etc) that I think covers everything. Then I host it under a github organisation (I am the admin of the org but the code is not hosted directly in my profile). Then I go back to the office next morning and ask one of the junior team members to fork it. In my head, I'm thinking that yeah well, I wrote something in my personal capacity somewhere and then somebody from the company forked it, so that's not my problem. So far so good... And the department is too much dependent on me so avoids any confrontation anyway. But I have always wondered, if this is fool proof? Can somebody find any loopholes in this approach and make it better...

Mandatum 5y ago
... Yeah I don't understand this at all, and I'm not going to try. Ever since my employer's started putting in that IP clause I stopped writing public/open-source code.
- _6lik 5y ago
  You can still do it in your mom's name, iykwim... but yeah such "shower clauses" are an abomination.
Uehreka 5y ago
IANAL, cannot comment on the legality, but as far as I’m concerned the comment about the department being too dependent on you is the most salient point of your entire post. There’s a whole universe of lawsuits and actions that can be filed and are not filed because companies calculate that they’ll extract a better return from a “live and let live” approach. There’s probably an ocean of open source that is in a work product gray area, and the companies just don’t care enough to do anything (think “I saw Alex working on a 2D physics game library after successfully deploying our latest healthcare platform feature. It will be of no use to us, and Alex is a good dev, let’s let it slide.”) A lot of copyright infringement goes un-acted on because it just doesn’t matter to the rights holders. But if they’re in a jurisdiction where they can enforce their work product agreement and then management changes, a new greedier manager might decide to claim Alex’s 2D physics engine on the almost-zero chance it becomes useful to them in the future. Probably not the smartest move, possibly a totally legal move. (But what do I know, IANAL)

neilv 5y ago

I posted an Ask HN on employee agreements ~10 months ago (for my previous startup, which was seed-ish stage), but the post got zero traction: * "Ask HN: What should early startup Employee Agreements require, and not?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26016445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26016445 If some founder wants to figure out how to do employee agreements better, they could be more equitable, and be more appealing than the scary FAANG document a hiring candidate is comparing it to.

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dehrmann 5y ago

What's the status of the license on this? The author made it Apache, but Bumble is making claims on it because of the employee's contract. It wasn't the employee's to release in the first place (as per the contract), but once it's out there, did the employee essentially open source it as an rogue agent of the company? At the same time, a Microsoft employee can't open source Windows and just say "oops." As a developer using open source code, how can you ever have enough certainty that an open source project won't run into issues like this?

rootusrootus 5y ago

On a related note, always be careful to look at the documents that come with things like stock grants that you may receive in addition to salary. There is frequently this same kind of legal language there which may not have been in the original employment contract you signed. My current company operates this way. The employment contract was pretty generic and didn't really have much IP-related language in it. But the first stock grant had a document that was quite a lot more specific. Fortunately nothing as onerous as described in this Twitter post, but still, it was good that I read all the documents before accepting the grant.

ToddWBurgess 5y ago

I know from talking to an IP lawyer, IP law has less to do with who is right and more about who has the deep pockets to afford an IP dispute.

Clubber 5y ago

Spolsky wrote a pretty good article on this very thing. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

anonymousiam 5y ago

I signed away all IP rights to Teledyne (my second job) in 1980. I've worked for three companies since then, and never had to sign anything like that. I'm pretty sure it's unenforceable, but the thing I signed basically said that anything I invent from that point forward, even after leaving Teledyne, would belong to them.

anaganisk 5y ago
Doesn’t that open up a chance of lawsuits with all your other employers?

beervirus 5y ago

> I will need to fork repos to continue my work. Uhhhh… if the employer owns it, it presumably isn’t going to be licensed as open source.

aaron695 5y ago

I would think you personally could be sued by people who contribute to your open-source libs that you don't own. Your employer owns your code and IP, including on your own time, you can't siphon off their IP from the workplace to yourself through your clever loophole of it's my time and equipment. This is not rocket science... and lot's of companies will allow you to work on your own stuff, just get it in writing, else they own it, or you have to go to court to prove it's not their IP, what a pain, multidisciplinary is a thing, it's not as simple as it's a different topic to my company. So you have no right to open source their code. So you are misleading other people who contribute to your 'fake' open source code. That's fraud and you are not on their time, so it's personal.

game_the0ry 5y ago

The repos in question have Apache licenses, v2.0. What is stopping me from cloning and pushing both to my own public github repo, with the same license?

eterevsky 5y ago

There was a discussion about a similar clause in employee contracts with Google Switzerland. Turns out such conditions are illegal according to Swiss law, and the clause was dropped.

yawnxyz 5y ago

I have a slightly unrelated question and I'm in need of advice: I'm about to work on a grant, with another PI at University of Sydney for a project we've worked on for four years. This grant is to advance our mission of building software system for supporting personalized bacteriophage therapy. Essentially, we're building software to make personalized therapy possible in this space, so we're building something critical for the project. We're building the software to get funding to "phase 2" which is 50x (8 figures) the amount of money the grant's already received. Currently we're employed on the project as contract researchers, but we (and our PI) wants us there in Australia in person. Since we're based in the US/Can, we need to get work visas, which require us to be employed by the grant directly. My question is: we have to sign employment agreements for the university, and our contracts look very much like the "we'll take everything you own, including your ideas you came up with in your shower at your own home" kind of contracts. We've already pushed back and laid out our position — we want to be able to continue building this project past the length of employment and past Phase 2, whether we get it or not. I don't really care if they get full, perpetual license to whatever I create there; it's most likely going to be OSS anyway. I just don't want them to prevent us from using it or OSS-ing it in the future. Has anyone else dealt with universities and institutions in this manner? Do they usually operate like companies in this way?

s1artibartfast 5y ago
Sounds like a tricky situation with respect to the visa. In my experience, it is pretty common for universities to operate in this way. The default position from legal teams ( uni or corporate) will always be to own everything.

RamblingCTO 5y ago

IANAL but I think at least in Germany that doesn't hold in court. I'm surprised by what (not specific to bumble) US companies get away with and that people can basically sell their lives.

questiondev 5y ago

never worked for a tech company outside of projects or contracts i’ve done for people i know and my own ventures (small ventures), i’ve coded since i was 9 years old, started out in BASIC then took up pascal but now code (or script) javascript/react and have been looking into firms to work for, the stuff that was brought up to me made me feel like i have to protect my off the clock source code. the only reason why i was looking into working for someone else was to raise enough money to finish bootstrapping an unrelated startup. looks like my fears are valid

bicepjai 5y ago

I can’t see the tweet. Ant links or images ?

michael7463 5y ago

Since the original tweet is deleted, here is an archived copy: https://archive.md/NvaFR https://archive.md/NvaFR