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An open note to Nick's Employers - 1) If you are a technology company, this is Harakiri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp
by ayanb 14y ago
An open note to Nick's Employers -
1) If you are a technology company, this is Harakiri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku). You are alienating every developer who is worth her salt. If you have a recruiting arm, and they are trying to recruit, god be with them. Ofcourse, you think people will never come to know, but this has the potential to be a good story and press will pick it up. I will not be surprised if Techcrunch or Wired Enterprise picks this up first.
2) Strategically, this is so uncool. You could have leveraged this open sourcing in several ways. Made the codebase part of your official Github ( ever heard of Bootstrap?) and drummed up participation. If THIS was the product, you could leverage the free PR to accelerate user-acquisition. Nick had some amazing documentation, and he even got SUCH a cool domain for you guys.
3) Eventually, you will lose Nick, who seems quite competent, who will move on to do better things under the umbrella of better employers.
Pretty lame, on several counts.
- iambibhas 14y agoThey have already lost Nick. It's just matter of time now.
- MrScruff 14y agoFrom the OP 'Sadly though, due to concerns from my employer regarding intellectual property and similarities in projects I've worked on, I've been asked to take down the site.' We have no way of assessing the validity of these concerns from what has been said. If the company feels the open source project contains work they have funded, and don't want to release, then it is their right to ask him to withdraw it. Also, unless Nick is primarily driven by open source participation there's nothing to say they will eventually lose him.
- manmal 14y agoNobody argued that it is not their right. Of course it is, or Nick would have left it up at Github. It's their right, but it's not "right".
- MrScruff 14y agoI think it's more of a grey area than that. Certainly I can imagine a situation where the overlap was insignificant and this was an overreach by the employer, but there is currently no evidence to suggest that.
- jasonlotito 14y agoOne could also say that in this case, Nick should have discussed this with the employer. It seems as if he was aware he should have, and by not doing so, the situation is no worse off than it would have been.
- gngeal 14y agoWas he also asked by his employer to take down his "final year university project" that this was supposed to be? That sounds a little bit incongruous to me. Or was the "final year university project" also somehow related to his job output preceding in the creation of said final year project?
- alexkus 14y agoThe IP of my final year (UK) university project belongs to the University not me, and not to the company that was sponsoring me for my final year.
- gngeal 14y agoThat just shows how ridiculous the laws in UK/US are. Around here, what you're describing would be expressly against the law.
- alexkus 14y agoIt would be helpful if you were more specific than just "Around here".
- gngeal 14y ago.cz
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- em1t 14y agoI think it's about the same thing in Sweden (the student has the rights). At the sime time, there are two different rights; copyright and "usage right" (not sure if that last thing is translated correctly), which means that you own the stuff you've created, but you can transfer the right of using it to someone else.
- fakeer 14y ago
- rmc 14y agoPeople aren't arguing that it's illegal or incorrect for them to take it down, or that they don't have the authority here. They are arguing that it's a stupid move.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bradleyland 14y agoIt's also possible that they (he and his employer) performed the "related work" on commission and have signed over IP rights to a client. In this case, open sourcing the work would expose them to liability from the client.
- keefe 14y agoplus it's javascript for christ's sake? the best they can do is obfuscate it.
- readme 14y agoObfuscation is more than enough to protect the code. You need only to make the cost of ripping it off greater than or equal to the cost of creating it. IP is so much more than the code. It's the concepts, the graphics, everything.
- keefe 14y agoI don't think so at all,even without trying to reverse it you can inspect the DOM and debug the event flow etc. I think "construction is more difficult than verification" is a good adage for engineering. JS/CSS is transmitted in the clear and it should move towards open source, plus it's not hugely valuable. Now, if this guy was doing projects at work to do charting and then he decides to open source that on his own? Not cool, you need to make your personal projects clear to your employers to avoid this nonsense. That being said if it was just charts and it was my company and he managed to get press on it... I'd probably give him a bit of a lecture about it and then probably a raise and continue it as open source.
- readme 14y agoI wasn't advocating for the company to use obfuscation. It's largely irrelevant in this regard. I was replying to the comment above mine which was left by someone who seems to think that obfuscated code is somehow less secure than compiled code. I agree -- if I was the boss in this situation the open source thing would be allowed to continue.
- mmahemoff 14y agoTo the people who make decisions like this, it's all 1s and 0s. I mean literally there will probably be some policy pertaining to "software", or some manager freaked about "software" being released. No-one will stop to care about the deployment model when making this call.
- Systemic33 14y agoSomeone found the company further down; linking to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5400190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5400190 EDIT: Many people have pointed that its not the correct company. EDIT2: http://www.expert-24.com/ http://www.expert-24.com/ seems to be the correct company, and seems more plausible to have IP problem with chart.js (don't got lynch them, seriously!)
- AnthonBerg 14y agoDoewn't work there anymore it seems, as in that's not the company in question (see linked-to cmt)
- ANH 14y agoRadweb is not the employer in question, according to his Twitter feed. He no longer works there.
- ed209 14y agotweet in question https://twitter.com/_nnnick/status/313983245987479552 https://twitter.com/_nnnick/status/313983245987479552
- rdohms 14y agoWell i guess the company does fit the profile, they even have a "patented expert system platform". Patents.. argh.
- Nursie 14y agoThey may be a very good employer. This may have been uncomfortably close to his closed-source day-job. Without details we don't know. And eventually everyone moves on. Company loyalty is dead.
- retrogradeorbit 14y agoLoyalty is reciprocal. I've never understood why companies expect complete loyalty while simultaneously showing none in return. I also think that it's very unlikely they are 'good employers'. They may pay well, but that's a totally different thing to being a good employer.
- Nursie 14y agoIf (and this is hypothetical, obviously) the guy open sourced something uncomfortably close to one of their products and uncomfortably close to what he does for his day job, I don't think this is unreasonable. I am a huge fan of Open Source, but not every company is, and I don't think it makes them a bad employer to have acted this way, given these supposed preconditions. You're correct that pay is only part of the equation, loyalty and respect are also very important. This action doesn't necessarily mean that these things are lacking. It may well do of course, the world is full of assholes :)
- shin_lao 14y agoYou have only one side of the story. Maybe the company doesn't have the rights on the code and cannot decide to open source it. Maybe they're making money with the code and open sourcing it is killing the business. Maybe they have a procedure before open sourcing code. If tomorrow I wake up with a developer open sourcing part of the work he does for us I would sure be very unhappy. You just can't condone that kind of initiative or in a couple of days your whole IP is on the Internet.
- fakeer 14y agoNick's words: It had been my final year university project I had been working on for a couple of months
- yitchelle 14y agoTrue, but "my final year university project" has many different possible explanations, and it is analogous to one of the iPad developer saying that "my project is the iPad" but doesn't mean that the IP belongs to the iPad developer.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoOften that means that the university claims rights in the IP produced, certainly [way back] when I matriculated it was required of all students to sign a waiver giving rights to the Uni for any works created whilst being a student. The first I heard about it was at the matriculation table when I'd already gone up. Perhaps this sort of thing doesn't happen elsewhere or as been deemed inappropriate.
- niggler 14y agoIt does happen in most US universities, but it's not something you normally ask about.
- incongruity 14y agoThat isn't/wasn't the case at either of my undergrad or graduate institutions – in fact, at my graduate program, the official policy on student work is that it is ours and if a team project, we all had non-exclusive rights to the work. Just a small anecdotal datapoint.
- baggachipz 14y agoI've worked at many companies who claim to "support" FOSS, without ever contributing. What that really means is that they support getting free software. Take + no give = parasite, end of story.
- RKoutnik 14y agoMy old job used their "Open software initiative" as a feel-good marketing pitch. Translated, it means "We charge you to install stuff we got for free." All of our clients couldn't tell the difference and their one experience with FOSS is paying money to get a (bad) install. I don't know what's worse, the abuse of the spirit of FOSS or the bad taste left in our client's mouths.
- Millennium 14y agoSeppuku is a method of expressing extreme regret: apology, protest, and similar things. What I'd agree that Nick's employers are acting in an extremely foolish manner, it doesn't sound like they regret anything.
- brazzy 14y agoReality check: the HN echo chamber isn't the world, not even the programming world. This is a totally minor matter that most people (even most programmers, even most programmers in the startup scene) will never hear about and forget quickly if they do.
- floatingice 14y agoWhere does Nick even work? The only people they alienate is someone who has enough time to cyberstalking him to find out... Agree that its lame though.