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In a lot of cases, ordinary employees who want to make a drive-by contribution to open source face two hurdles: 1/ Their employment contract specifies that all
by ajb 2y ago
In a lot of cases, ordinary employees who want to make a drive-by contribution to open source face two hurdles:
1/ Their employment contract specifies that all IP they generate during their employment is owned by their employer. Contributing to open source, as well as being a technical action, is a legal action (that of licensing your contribution under the project license) which they don't have the authority to do as individuals, and therefore must obtain authorisation from their employer.
2/ given the former, some legally conservative projects require a signed contribution agreement from contributors employers. This usually requires the employers legal dept to approve it, since the legal dept reviews all such contracts.
It would be nice if there was some blanket scheme that employers could sign up to to authorise all de-minimis contributions to open source projects, or contributions that are actually useful for the work people are employed to do. But I'm not aware of any such scheme.
- schneems 2y agoI consider any companies that would blanket prohibit open source contribution out of scope of my statement. With those that won’t even allow employees to open a bug report or post on a forum to be an extreme outlier. Especially in the context of a company that bought a booth at an open source conference. Legal hurdles exist, but IMHO are the subject of endless hand wringing and awareness campaigns already. Most in that community are seemingly unaware that devs need much more support: socially, mentally, and tactically. In order to become successful open source contributors. So really what I’m saying is that making things legally easier isn’t enough. Advocating that people should contribute isn’t enough. We should be actively training and helping to prepare the next generation of contributors. And doing it in a way that doesn’t overly burden existing maintainers.
- SR2Z 2y agoContributing code to OSS should not fall under "IP" unless the code was written on company time. IP refers to concrete things like patents and in almost every case cannot apply to stuff created outside of and unrelated to work.
- saagarjha 2y agoDepends on what your work is.
- ajb 2y agoThis is true under California law (or was last I heard - I'm neither a lawyer nor in California). Unfortunately California is something of an exception. Many other jurisdictions allow employers to claim all IP, or broadly IP related to company work. I agree with it as a 'should', though.