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A job doesn't have to be paid "at will" employment working for a company. You might be a founder of the company, and the company might have contracts with payin

by pdonis 4y ago

A job doesn't have to be paid "at will" employment working for a company. You might be a founder of the company, and the company might have contracts with paying customers. You might be an independent contractor with contractual agreements with clients. Contractual agreements of that sort that involve open source software are the situations where open source software would be your job. But with Homebrew, none of this is the case; Homebrew does not have paying users, and the organization the project is a part of is a nonprofit that has no contractual agreements with anyone regarding the project, and does not pay employees to work on it--the project maintainers are all unpaid volunteers. Such a situation is typical for open source projects, and in such a situation, the project is not anyone's job because no one has any binding commitments to it. Even in the case of "at will" employment with a company, an employee generally can't quit with zero notice; there is some kind of notification period, even if it's only a week or two. But in any case, in such a situation, the company is highly unlikely to be providing open source software that many other users depend on; and even if it were, the contractual agreements with paying users, if any, would be the company's, not the employees'. So even if the employee might be able to say they can just walk away from a "job", the company can't. The company has binding commitments that it will suffer penalties for breaking; those commitments are the company's job. And if the company doesn't have any such binding commitments, then providing that open source software is not the company's job, any more than providing Homebrew is the Homebrew volunteers' job. It's something they do because they feel like it.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
>> Even in the case of "at will" employment with a company, an employee generally can't quit with zero notice; there is some kind of notification period, even if it's only a week or two. No, actually the whole at-will thing means that is literally not the case. It's polite to give notice, it might be tied to some form of severance to give notice, but in 49 US states you absolutely have the right to get up from your desk, right this second, leave, and never come back. And your employers only legal action will be to pay you for the time right up until you quit.
- pdonis 4y ago
  If you have a contract with your employer, "at will" employment does not give you the right to violate it. Many employees (for example, those who are part of collective bargaining agreements) might not fully realize that they have a contractual obligation to their employer not to quit without notice. (Executives, who are more likely to have individually negotiated agreements, are of course far more likely to be aware of the implications.)
  - phkahler 4y ago
    So some jobs have obligations that others don't.

by pdonis 4y ago

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

>> Even in the case of "at will" employment with a company, an employee generally can't quit with zero notice; there is some kind of notification period, even if it's only a week or two. No, actually the whole at-will thing means that is literally not the case. It's polite to give notice, it might be tied to some form of severance to give notice, but in 49 US states you absolutely have the right to get up from your desk, right this second, leave, and never come back. And your employers only legal action will be to pay you for the time right up until you quit.

pdonis 4y ago
If you have a contract with your employer, "at will" employment does not give you the right to violate it. Many employees (for example, those who are part of collective bargaining agreements) might not fully realize that they have a contractual obligation to their employer not to quit without notice. (Executives, who are more likely to have individually negotiated agreements, are of course far more likely to be aware of the implications.)
- phkahler 4y ago
  So some jobs have obligations that others don't.