7 ms·

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

by mkii 3y ago

stickfigure 3y ago
If we're being generous, the author may have had permission to do so. It's not inconceivable; the code was abandoned. If one of my reports had asked, I would have approved.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  You probably don't have the authority to allow your report to release "company code" on their personal Github account.
  - justinwp 3y ago
    I think you might be surprised how easy this process is at some big tech companies. For me the bigger hurdle is getting past a privacy review, not the issue of the license.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Yes, I would be surprised. What big tech company makes it easy for you to take code written and deployed there while you were employed, and just open-source it? I know there are big tech firms that own everything you do outside of work, but have a fairly easy process to allow you to release that as open-source. But this is different, this is about code written for and deployed by the company itself, that isn't part of any corporate open-source strategy.
      - closeparen 3y ago
        “Corporate open source strategy” where I work is just having a form that engineers can fill out to request to open source things, and a committee on the other end of the form to sign off. It’s similar to the process for speaking at a conference or publishing on the company blog. Management sometimes steers in the direction of more or less public content, but specific releases are always individual initiative by engineers who want to develop their project in the open. Tech brand wants our name associated with high quality work.
      - swores 3y ago
        I've only managed small businesses not large ones, but personally I'd be fine 9 times out of 10 with a developer who asked to open source a project they had built an mvp/poc of, but that never got approved to be used at all. I could even imagine approving of a policy for the open sourcing / licensing of code, where any code that's used or previously used by the company in any way needs to go through an approvals process if anyone wants to open source it, while anything created but never used has a much simpler barrier such as manager agreeing in writing that it's unneeded code and therefore eligible for instant open sourcing under a specific license and specific terms of release. > "But this is different, this is about code written for and deployed by the company itself" Written for, yes, but seemingly never deployed (except to the extent that it could be demo'd and rejected). From the article: > [After looking at a product owned by an unrelated team in the company, he single-handedly decided to make what he thought would be a good add-on or sibling to it] "I demoed Box Sums to the Box Notes team at some point, and they nitpicked the UI and implementation details (“What if two people type in the same cell at the same time? They’ll just overwrite each other.” ). Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day." It's not impossible "nothing came of it" is a shortened version of "they said it seemed like an awesome tool but too far from the original scope to want to take on and commit to maintaining, and as they said there was no chance that decision would change my manager agreed to sign off on my releasing it under MIT license as is allowed for un-used code."
    - glandium 3y ago
      Story time. In a past life, I tried to open source code I wrote at work. My manager greenlit it, but obviously that wasn't enough. Next thing I know, I'm in a room with a lawyer trying to write a patent. In the end, no patent was filed, and the code was never open sourced. What a waste. Arguably, that was 15+ years ago, it would probably go down differently now...
      - mbreese 3y ago
        I do academic research and write a ton of code to support this. In grad school (many years ago) at a Midwestern state school, I try to release some code under GPL and get blocked by the school's tech transfer department. It's a program that was designed to support the lab research we were doing (LIMS, ordering, etc). It wasn't much, but it very much made our lab run better. In the end, they licensed it out to a start up that flamed out. The entire process was messy, but all I really wanted was to release it with a GPL license and get on with my work. That office made my life quite difficult through grad school. Fast forward a few years and I'm now at Stanford and then later UCSF. I email the tech transfer office about some code I'm planning on publishing, expecting a similar back and forth. It took all of two minutes to get back an email: Are you planning on making money with this code? If so, let us know. If not, any open source license is fine with us. It was a quite refreshing change to deal with institutions that knew what they were doing w.r.t. IP.
- tomcam 3y ago
  I’m assuming you own the company. Because if you don’t, you don’t have that right.
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    You might or might not; it's not like Google polls the shareholders to decide what source license to use for each project. Authority gets delegated and every company is different.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
    Unless the company has an open source program that allows open source releases with manager approval.
- troupe 3y ago
  That might happen at a small organization, but in large orgs, it is rarely that simple.
zik 3y ago
My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.
- sneak 3y ago
  The code is MIT licensed. Anyone is legally allowed to upload MIT licensed code to GitHub, it's free software and may be freely redistributed.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    The code is MIT licensed if and only if the copyright holder - not the author of the story but respectively Box or Uber - explicitly made it MIT licensed. Without a legally binding commitment from these companies, a "license.txt" at the repository can't make it MIT licensed, all it means that the author is lying about its license. He doesn't own the code (despite writing it) so his "permission" is worse than worthless (by being dangerously misleading) without an explicit blessing by the company - even an implicit "we probably don't care" doesn't cut it.
  - treesknees 3y ago
    It’s alarming because, in my experience, anything you write for an employer is intellectual property of the company. Unless he wrote that Box demo all on his own time and his own equipment completely outside of work, or Box has some abnormal contract with their employees, he can’t just slap an MIT license onto it and call it open source. I worked with a few people who were successfully sued by our employer when those people left and brought a “spare time” project/tool with them and tried to publish it. It wasn’t even code we sold or ended up using internally, but was still IP of the company because they wrote it during business hours on a work machine.
    - sneak 3y ago
      Yes, but if we speculate as to the invalidity of the explicitly published license, we basically can't use any foss code on GitHub. Any reasonable person can expect that the MIT license on this code is valid and authorized by the rightsholder. Did Uber or Box explicitly agree to release it under an foss license? Is it the author's personal individual copyright made on personal hardware outside of work location/time? Does it predate their employment? Nothing in the article linked indicates clearly that it was written for an employer. If I am expected to research this for every foss library published on GitHub by someone who works for Big Tech, then we are all capital-f fucked. It's easiest and sanest to assume that people are not lying.
tomcam 3y ago
That jumped right out at me too. Two levels of IP theft except on the remote chance that both companies allowed OP to open source the code.
camel_gopher 3y ago
That’s called being a Code Gypsy
slim 3y ago
[flagged]
concordDance 3y ago
That's because that code wasn't in use, so there's no lost business.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  That isn't how ownership works.
  - kome 3y ago
    yes, but who cares. software is software.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      No idea what your point is, sorry.
      - kome 3y ago
        i understand ownership, but software and code are so easy to copy, transfer and modify that it would be stupid not to do it. it's not like stealing a car. arrr in other words: ownership of immaterial goods is mostly a scam
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        It wouldn't be stupid not to. It would be ethical not to. You can do it, but you'd better hope you live in a world where most people don't do it.
        swores 3y ago
        Would the world definitely be a worse place if the laws were amended to say "any software developer owns equal IP rights to the code they create as part of their jobs along with the company, so either party can do anything they want with it"? I'm not sure it would - although it disadvantages the companies compared to the current situation, it's not like they would choose to stop hiring devs to work for them - and that's just a legalisation of the currently unethical behaviour that you think is definitely a worse situation to have? It's interesting to think about, at least!
Angostura 3y ago
Indeed. Having warned against "If you treat the code like a pet for sentimental reasons, you’re working in direct opposition to the interests of the business." He does exactly that.
prmoustache 3y ago
Actually that was the first thing I looked for in the comments, even before finishing the article and seeing he even published the finished code on his own repo (and not box or uber one), under his only name.
somsak2 3y ago
what are you talking about? there's a huge comment thread on here exactly about this issue.

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

by mkii 3y ago

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

stickfigure 3y ago

If we're being generous, the author may have had permission to do so. It's not inconceivable; the code was abandoned. If one of my reports had asked, I would have approved.

Kon-Peki 3y ago
You probably don't have the authority to allow your report to release "company code" on their personal Github account.
- justinwp 3y ago
  I think you might be surprised how easy this process is at some big tech companies. For me the bigger hurdle is getting past a privacy review, not the issue of the license.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Yes, I would be surprised. What big tech company makes it easy for you to take code written and deployed there while you were employed, and just open-source it? I know there are big tech firms that own everything you do outside of work, but have a fairly easy process to allow you to release that as open-source. But this is different, this is about code written for and deployed by the company itself, that isn't part of any corporate open-source strategy.
    - closeparen 3y ago
      “Corporate open source strategy” where I work is just having a form that engineers can fill out to request to open source things, and a committee on the other end of the form to sign off. It’s similar to the process for speaking at a conference or publishing on the company blog. Management sometimes steers in the direction of more or less public content, but specific releases are always individual initiative by engineers who want to develop their project in the open. Tech brand wants our name associated with high quality work.
    - swores 3y ago
      I've only managed small businesses not large ones, but personally I'd be fine 9 times out of 10 with a developer who asked to open source a project they had built an mvp/poc of, but that never got approved to be used at all. I could even imagine approving of a policy for the open sourcing / licensing of code, where any code that's used or previously used by the company in any way needs to go through an approvals process if anyone wants to open source it, while anything created but never used has a much simpler barrier such as manager agreeing in writing that it's unneeded code and therefore eligible for instant open sourcing under a specific license and specific terms of release. > "But this is different, this is about code written for and deployed by the company itself" Written for, yes, but seemingly never deployed (except to the extent that it could be demo'd and rejected). From the article: > [After looking at a product owned by an unrelated team in the company, he single-handedly decided to make what he thought would be a good add-on or sibling to it] "I demoed Box Sums to the Box Notes team at some point, and they nitpicked the UI and implementation details (“What if two people type in the same cell at the same time? They’ll just overwrite each other.” ). Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day." It's not impossible "nothing came of it" is a shortened version of "they said it seemed like an awesome tool but too far from the original scope to want to take on and commit to maintaining, and as they said there was no chance that decision would change my manager agreed to sign off on my releasing it under MIT license as is allowed for un-used code."
  - glandium 3y ago
    Story time. In a past life, I tried to open source code I wrote at work. My manager greenlit it, but obviously that wasn't enough. Next thing I know, I'm in a room with a lawyer trying to write a patent. In the end, no patent was filed, and the code was never open sourced. What a waste. Arguably, that was 15+ years ago, it would probably go down differently now...
    - mbreese 3y ago
      I do academic research and write a ton of code to support this. In grad school (many years ago) at a Midwestern state school, I try to release some code under GPL and get blocked by the school's tech transfer department. It's a program that was designed to support the lab research we were doing (LIMS, ordering, etc). It wasn't much, but it very much made our lab run better. In the end, they licensed it out to a start up that flamed out. The entire process was messy, but all I really wanted was to release it with a GPL license and get on with my work. That office made my life quite difficult through grad school. Fast forward a few years and I'm now at Stanford and then later UCSF. I email the tech transfer office about some code I'm planning on publishing, expecting a similar back and forth. It took all of two minutes to get back an email: Are you planning on making money with this code? If so, let us know. If not, any open source license is fine with us. It was a quite refreshing change to deal with institutions that knew what they were doing w.r.t. IP.
tomcam 3y ago
I’m assuming you own the company. Because if you don’t, you don’t have that right.
- stickfigure 3y ago
  You might or might not; it's not like Google polls the shareholders to decide what source license to use for each project. Authority gets delegated and every company is different.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  Unless the company has an open source program that allows open source releases with manager approval.
troupe 3y ago
That might happen at a small organization, but in large orgs, it is rarely that simple.

zik 3y ago

My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.

sneak 3y ago
The code is MIT licensed. Anyone is legally allowed to upload MIT licensed code to GitHub, it's free software and may be freely redistributed.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  The code is MIT licensed if and only if the copyright holder - not the author of the story but respectively Box or Uber - explicitly made it MIT licensed. Without a legally binding commitment from these companies, a "license.txt" at the repository can't make it MIT licensed, all it means that the author is lying about its license. He doesn't own the code (despite writing it) so his "permission" is worse than worthless (by being dangerously misleading) without an explicit blessing by the company - even an implicit "we probably don't care" doesn't cut it.
- treesknees 3y ago
  It’s alarming because, in my experience, anything you write for an employer is intellectual property of the company. Unless he wrote that Box demo all on his own time and his own equipment completely outside of work, or Box has some abnormal contract with their employees, he can’t just slap an MIT license onto it and call it open source. I worked with a few people who were successfully sued by our employer when those people left and brought a “spare time” project/tool with them and tried to publish it. It wasn’t even code we sold or ended up using internally, but was still IP of the company because they wrote it during business hours on a work machine.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Yes, but if we speculate as to the invalidity of the explicitly published license, we basically can't use any foss code on GitHub. Any reasonable person can expect that the MIT license on this code is valid and authorized by the rightsholder. Did Uber or Box explicitly agree to release it under an foss license? Is it the author's personal individual copyright made on personal hardware outside of work location/time? Does it predate their employment? Nothing in the article linked indicates clearly that it was written for an employer. If I am expected to research this for every foss library published on GitHub by someone who works for Big Tech, then we are all capital-f fucked. It's easiest and sanest to assume that people are not lying.

tomcam 3y ago

That jumped right out at me too. Two levels of IP theft except on the remote chance that both companies allowed OP to open source the code.

camel_gopher 3y ago

That’s called being a Code Gypsy

slim 3y ago

[flagged]

concordDance 3y ago

That's because that code wasn't in use, so there's no lost business.

robertlagrant 3y ago
That isn't how ownership works.
- kome 3y ago
  yes, but who cares. software is software.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    No idea what your point is, sorry.
    - kome 3y ago
      i understand ownership, but software and code are so easy to copy, transfer and modify that it would be stupid not to do it. it's not like stealing a car. arrr in other words: ownership of immaterial goods is mostly a scam
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        It wouldn't be stupid not to. It would be ethical not to. You can do it, but you'd better hope you live in a world where most people don't do it.
        swores 3y ago
        Would the world definitely be a worse place if the laws were amended to say "any software developer owns equal IP rights to the code they create as part of their jobs along with the company, so either party can do anything they want with it"? I'm not sure it would - although it disadvantages the companies compared to the current situation, it's not like they would choose to stop hiring devs to work for them - and that's just a legalisation of the currently unethical behaviour that you think is definitely a worse situation to have? It's interesting to think about, at least!

Angostura 3y ago

Indeed. Having warned against "If you treat the code like a pet for sentimental reasons, you’re working in direct opposition to the interests of the business." He does exactly that.

prmoustache 3y ago

Actually that was the first thing I looked for in the comments, even before finishing the article and seeing he even published the finished code on his own repo (and not box or uber one), under his only name.

somsak2 3y ago

what are you talking about? there's a huge comment thread on here exactly about this issue.