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from the better-don-your-asbestos-undergarments dept.
An anonymous poster 'The ABKCO Thieves' writes in about new hire paperwork.
I recently started work at a well-known e-commerce business, which is a great opportunity for me. Only after I started did I find out the full inventions, NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), non-poaching, and work-for-hire agreement is onerous. It treats any work of authorship during my employment as their property, even if done on my own time and equipment. I can't post the agreement because it would identify the company, and potentially me as well.
Earlier this year I began contributing code to a GPL v2 project that has existed for more than a decade. I want to continue to do so, but how can I without risking "contamination" of it thanks to this agreement? Part of my goal in contributing is to have real live code I can point to, so going under the radar defeats that purpose.
Are these sorts of intellectual property agreements common?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:04AM
Quit now and continue writing Free Software. Of course this means you will also have no income, and you will have to live like RMS: stop bathing, eat your own shit, beg on the street, take welfare handouts. That's the life you choose when you contribute to a GPL project.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:15AM
That might have been the only option back then, but today there are companies that explicitly develop GPLed code, so developing GPLed code and being employed are not mutually exclusive. The company might still own the copyright on the code you wrote, but as long as the company releases it under the GPL, who cares?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:29AM
On a less drastic side, you could always try to stay anonymous with any GPL coding you do. Make sure of course that it has absolutely nothing to do with your day job anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:39AM
Yes but anonymity in this case would mean whenever the submitter wants real credit for GPL work, it will involve a nod and a wink to say, that anonymous work was mine, trust me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @09:23AM
Isn't there a term to solve this?
Why not create a pseudonym?
(Score: 4, Informative) by choose another one on Tuesday September 13 2016, @09:14AM
Exactly - work-for-hire clauses are not exactly new. They are also the reason for the following FSF position (my emphasis):
In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer
.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @12:32AM
My company made you sign this type of clause, and it says that they own any code you write, plus you have to notify them of anything on which you are working. The FSF statement about assigning copyright will not apply to work for hire. I thought about this for a while, and decided that if I want to work on anything it must have a GPL V3 license. I will tell the company that they can claim copyright to what I create, but they must comply with the requirement to provide source code, and patent indemnity.