

Ask HN: Company IP agreements and unrelated FOSS projects - jofer

I recently started a new job with a large company. They require all of their employees to sign an intellectual property agreement.  The agreement is _very_ broad, and they basically claim full ownership over anything and everything any employee does on or off the job, regardless of whether or not it's related to work.  This explicitly includes things copyright on photos, text, code, music, and ownership of any patentable ideas that any employee comes up with.  It also includes this post, for that matter.<p>I'm a scientist and not a software engineer. However, I have several small open source projects that I'd like to at least keep alive. They're basically things that either came out of my dissertation or are pure hobbies. I only ever work on them in my free time. I've also been an occasional contributor to a handful of large projects.<p>I asked about contributing to FOSS projects, and the answer was basically, "As long as it's not related to any sort of company IP, it should be okay, but everything needs to go through the external publication review process". (Which takes 4-6 weeks.)  By everything, they mean every commit.<p>Obviously, not all terms are enforced in practice. I know other people who just ignore it for unrelated hobby projects and (obviously) for things like showing vacation photos to friends.<p>Let me preface this with: “I'm asking for moral/practical advice, not legal advice". Legally, the issue is quite clear.<p>What would you do?  Would you stop contributing to FOSS entirely?  Would you stop contributing to larger projects so that there aren't any copyright issues in the future? Would you just do everything anonymously? Would you just send every commit through their review process? (Which requires a _word_ document of it... I find this idea amusing... I wonder if I can write a git hook to make a .doc of the diff and e-mail it automatically?)
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OldSchool
Morally I see no problem at all for anything done outside of your working
hours and not derived from your work. They can't own you as property. Most
people with a W-2 style job these days have signed something like what you
describe. People sign non-compete clauses too but in many places they're
widely known to be unenforceable. That doesn't stop employers from putting
them into contracts there.

Practically speaking, if you decide to skip their "external review" process,
then yes, I'd say make sure your name isn't obviously associated with any
given hobby project.

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jofer
Good point. I'm probably being overly paranoid. Just avoiding an obviously
"Real Name" tag is probably more than enough. Thanks, at any rate!

