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GNU and the General Public Employment Contract?
adubey asks: "We all know and love the GNU General Public Lisence. Some have argued that the availability of a standard lisence such as GPL along with hard lobbying work by Richard Stallman and others are both among the many forces that helped push free software forward. However, there is still a big laundry list of things holding free software back. Included on this list are restrictive employment contracts that forbid many developers from contributing to free software projects, even if some contributions could help them on the job. Rather than simply write off these people as being stupid for signing one-sided contracts, could we do something to pursuade managers to be more open to free software development? What if there was a standard contract available, between employers and employees, that spefically gave employees the right to contribute to free software projects so long as it benefits the company they work for?" An interesting idea and one that I hope will spark some interesting discussion. Would such a thing be the answer to this problem?
"Now, IANAL, but is it possible to have some type contract that says it would override any previous IP agreement? In other words, allow companies to keep current contracts in place, but overrides previous contracts in the one key detail that it will allow developers to release enhancements to free software packages, so long as the enhancements were developed for the benefit of the company (even if the enhancement - say a bug fix in gcc - is never released in itself)"
So why is it that employers are able to force most programmers to sign contracts with all sorts of things that are against our own interests? The reason is that employers are organized and they have the power to hire or fire us. They use that power over us to get contracts that they like.
So what we need to do is organize and use our power (we provide the code, of course, and without that, they can do nothing) to get contracts we like. Yes, even with all the dot-coms going down the toilet, the top programmers can pick and choose companies to work for, and make a good contract part of the bargain. But most programmers are not in that position, to individually demand a good contract. On the other hand, together, we can demand a good contract.
And, to answer a question someone had, yes, contracts can be renegotiated at any time -- the trick is how to convince the employer that renegotiating is in there best interests? Well, if you are an individual, you can threaten to quit over it. That works sometimes, but if your company has 500 programmers, they won't miss you much, and don't kid yourself about your importance. Now, if 50 or 100 or 400 of the programmers got together and demanded a good contract covering IP issues, or whatever, then the employer's choices are more limited.
IWW
On a related note, does anyone have any tips of finding Open-Source-friendly employers? I'm looking for a job in Web Development (or Web Engineering), but most of the job postings that I've seen are very MS-centric :(. And, it's not that I'd refuse to work in an MS-shop, but I'd prefer not to use only MS software.
I know about GNUJobs, but that doesn't seem to be very comprehensive (a search for "html" yields two hits, for example). And of course many OSS projects have their own "Jobs" section, but I was hoping for more of an all-in-one site..
Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I used one of their clauses in my contract that I use with my clients--I am a contractor. No one has complained and no one has had a problem with it. If they have questions, I just explain it and that is usually it.
Additionally, I just cross out and initialize the IP section when I sign contracts. If it gets sent back to me, I try to provide them with a better clause (such as one of these).
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
My only problem is the fact that the employee is only allowed to contribute to a project that would benefit his/her company in some way -- many of us are bound by contract in such a way that anything we do, regardless of whether it is on our own time, on our own equipment, in an area that our company does not and conceivably will not ever enter, belongs to the company.
For us, this would only partially eliminate the problem. What about those of us who work as webmonkeys but are audiophiles by night? It's inconceivable that a web company would branch into, say, audio compression/encoding software - so a development there wouldn't benefit the company in any conceivable way, even though the development may be of outstanding quality, and would help the project immensely.
I'd say that such a license should give far-reaching overrides on these IP clauses, in such a way that the employee would be able to contribute code done during off-hours on their own equipment to any free software project. That would be MUCH more helpful.
Now...if the code is developed on company time and/or equipment, I'd be one of the first to say that the company would be entitled to some say in what happens with that code, and a licence such as this one would help...unfortunately, I don't see many companies going for this - especially in this day and age of "Intellectual Property" cases springing up like weeds in a garden...
This would be a great way for companies to allow employees to contribute to OSS projects - but it doesn't address the whole problem, only a small part of it.
Note: I'm not bound by an agreement such as I describe - mine expressly allows me to develop whatever I want on my own time and equipment, so long as it doesn't compete with my work - fine by me. I do have several buddies who ARE in an agreement such as the one I described above, so I know second-hand the troubles involved.
here here!
If they're going to claim ownership of my thoughts while I'm there, and thus limit what I can do when I'm not, then they had damn well better pay me for the work thoughts when I'm not there!
I'm really glad I'm free to do what I want on my own time and equipment, but I have friends who are bound by rather sickening (IMHO) strictures on what they can do in their off time - one was even told that he had to transfer ownership of his domain to his company, since they considered his webpage a "work" that they could claim ownership of. Needless to say, he quit the following day. Now he's working for 2 years in retail, as his noncompete disallows him from programming for anyone else for 2 years.
Ha ha, you think you are so clever, don't you. But RMS does offer the course free of charge. He allows anybody to record them, transcribe them, etc and send that information to anybody they want.
I think he does charge if you want for some reason to hire him to actually speak the words. But the words are free.
This has nothing to do with that. This is to allow the employee to work on outside projects and put those under the GPL. It has absolutely no effect on what the employee can and can't do to the code they write as part of their employment.
If this were a problem they would have to require that somebody not read GPL code. They would also have a problem if the employee already has read some GPL code. It does not appear the companies are making such requirements, so this is still irrelevant to the argument: whether or not the company forces the employee to sign this agreement, it does not change how much GPL code that employee can look at and potentially steal from.
And seriously: programmers are hired from different companies all the time and they bring with them knowledge of how the older company's software works, and legally they are not supposed to use this. This has not caused very much trouble despite the fact that the source company probably has a lot more legal clout than the GPL would ever have.
When you buy something at a store, it is covered by a contract...an implied contract. The purchase is covered by a set of laws that nearly all the states have agreed on (sorry, I'm talking from an American point of view here). Overall, this is a good thing because it sets a base understanding to the transaction that provides a good starting point. Every facet of the negotiation doesn't need to be covered in excruciating detail, because it is understood that anything that isn't covered will be taken care of by the default 'contract'.
Techies as a whole should promote this sort of contract until it becomes the default, maybe even pushing for legislative backing. The alternative is to read contract that are laid out in excruciating detail (ie, legalese) and are construed to take all your rights without you knowing it. A contract that only has one line:
The default, except All your code are belong to us.
is much more likely to set off red flags.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It seems to me that this would be a reason to support having a programmer's union. The solidarity of a union would make it easier to try to stand up to such employer behavior.
You think this is different to any other type of contract? Every company is going to get their lawyers to write every contract so it's in their best interests. Best interests for Microsoft is not going to be the same as best interests for Red Hat, so naturally they will have different contracts.
It seems to me that the sort of employer who would have a restrictive contract is exactly the sort of employer who would refuse to sign this override.
I have never seen an employer deny a reasonable request to participate in non-competitive open source development. I had no problem arranging for this in my last transaction, even though I was hired in the capacity of an officer directing the entire R&D operation.
Just ask. Most any reasonable employer will agree.
If a standardized contract that protects a programmer's rights to produce his own work on his time is introduced and accepted in the industry, it should give programmers leverage they need when negotiating these contracts.
Because GNU is already a recognized authority in the IT world, it would be significantly easier to make an employer agre to a contract coming from them than it would be to make them accept something drawn up by your lawyer.
Ñ'
I'd agree if the idea of an organized body of programmers didn't scare me so much ;)
"Old man yells at systemd"
will:
/consider/ anything less than 'we get first crack at anything you do, and even then you probably cant use it anywhere else'
... =)
a) enough employees stay out of work to fuel the neccessary employment boycott to get companies to even
or
b) companies say 'no', 95% of employees say 'oh well, I tried, but its better than being unemployed', and we all keep living this beautiful capitalist dream without a care in the world
I think b. But, who knows
"Old man yells at systemd"
One of my biggest gripes about the job search/accept process today is that every employer has his or her own employment contract. Now, although the effect of most of these contracts is the same, they all are slightly different - to the effect that every employer has to hire lawyers to write the contract and every employee has to hire a lawyer to review it. Keep in mind that many law firms have stock contracts that they just modify for their client - while still billing them full price, of course!
So I heartily endorse this concept. It would really be great if sought-after tech workers could put their preferred employment contract on their resume. As it became more common, more and more people would realize the big time savings and I think it could catch on. And some lawyers would lose some business. Sounds good to me.
Can your IM do this?
- The GNU "use of the word hacker" license: under this document, the word "hacker" will be copyrighted by GNU, but the general public will be allowed to continue using it as long as they include the GNU official definition (differentiating it, of course, from the word "cracker") in a footnote and don't make proprietary extensions on the definition.
- The EFF Open Dating Protocol, whereby geeks can register an (s) next to their names with the EFF (for "single") and they will be matched up for free with an available woman, at no cost to either party and ensuring that any pictures taken during the encounter are freely tradable on sites like "pronster" or hell, even IRC.
- the GNU Owns Everything License: Under this contract, the entire world will sign everything over to the EFF, who, it is self-evident, know more about everything and will just generally manage stuff better. When contacted for comment, RMS was quoted as saying "You have no chance to survive make your time!!"
Now back to your regularly scheduled trolls.Thank you.
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As such, if it's even moderately sized, you probably have some breathing room to negotiate terms. First off, it really is critical that you *READ YOUR CONTRACT* before you sign. If it is has some rediculous thing like "anything done by employee at any time during employment is IP or employer," then talk to the HR person!
A much more reasonable contract is one that assigns all rights 1) relating to stuff you do on company time or equipment, or 2) relating to the subject matter you work on at work. If you do coding in your spare time, it's your business; your employer should recognize this. It's quite simple.
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Come on we're all supposed to be hackers here, so take the hackers approach, keep them seperate, keep them quiet and use a handle/pseudo-name, a practical workable solution.
I think the submittor is talking about the annoying tendency of comapnies to claim off-hours project as their IP. If I write a program on my own time, I should be able to claim it as my intellectual property, and slap the GPL on it. It's not like I'm taking a second job, I'm giving away my work.
Let me start by saying IANAL, but I've been looking into this quite a bit while working to go independent from my past employer. Current law (i.e., statute + rulings) leans really heavily toward the employer on this issue. For example, if you do a side project without any company resources and not on company time, it's still theirs if it's inspired by any IP of the company or addresses any current or future needs of the company that could be reasonably know by the employee.
But the land-grab mentality about intellectual property causes problems. If I use a company laptop, there might be grounds for them to claim they own my project. Same if I use a company email account on a project mailing list, or if post a quick note about a bug from work.
As I mentioned above, it gets worse than that. Let's say your company is working on an application to do X. You, on your own time, realize that there is a need out there to integrate X with Y and write some middleware to do it. Your employer could claim IP rights to the middleware, without compensation.
I'm not saying these things are right. Infact, I believe the opposite. But, getting an employer to waive their rights to the extent you describe is gonna take more than a simple contract. The contract might work now if employers still perceive a scarcity of employees. When a glut of IT workers comes, and it will, employers will have no incentive to sign it.
If you want to do something legal to protect your rights as an employee, unionize. Once organized, force the agreement on employers.
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Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
But those who would contribute to free software shouldn't be working for companies that won't let them. I know the company I work for is great about this. :-) And this was something I looked at before signing.
If a company takes your software and says they own it, then when they give it to a customer they have to take responsiblity if anything goes wrong with the software. So if they demand your software you wrote, give them a really buggy poorly functioning version of the software. Then when a customer runs it and it trashes their system, it will be the companies fault since they own it, not you. Trashing your own software may sound bad but if a company demands they own it, you won't get any credit for your software and it won't have anything to do with your name anymore.
While this may not be a practical solution it would be a fun one. =)
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
- Windows
- Unix
- Mac
- Amiga
- ...
Same thing for Programming Languages; Editors, Coding Styles - "In a function declaration the begin block ( "{" sign ) should be in the same line as the function parameters"; "In the next line"; "Two lines bellow"; "In the living room"; "In my grandma's place";Total and complete paralysis.
.. there's always FreeNetting it or remailing it anonymously or pseudonymously ;)
I'm somewhat fortunate, in that I'm working for a company that Has A Clue(tm) [yes, it's a Linux-centric consultancy.. hey, travel, a four-day workweek, fat pipe, and a six figure salary means good times!] and they have clear distinctions in what is GPLd and what is.. ahem.. not.
The basic rule most companies should use is that of relevancy. If the GPL project is sufficiently close to the company's prop projects, like someone at Intuit working on GnuCash, then there should be some restriction (after all, if our hypothetical hacker knows the details of QuickBooks files inside and out, and the company wants it secret, he would probably be covered under an NDA or trade secret laws and cannot legally do so).
However, if someone who works with spreadsheet code helps out the Gimp, or some vector-graphics coder props up KDE and GNOME (I like both.. the war stops here!), that is completely different and should be reasonably out of bounds.
Relevance should be the criterion, not the fact that the microserf works for you.
Windows.. Good for targeting rocks.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Of course, the employer is now distributing GPLed code, but c'est la vie. Any beef they have with that needs to be taken up with their lawyers (who can be identified by the IAAL in their emails) who clearly failed to rule out an industry-standard software licensing practice.
I'm guessing that any sort of "standard contract" probably would not merge well with an existing contract. The place I can see this being helpful is for programmers getting new jobs. They would first need to get their prospective employer to sign this "loose" contract of terms that both parties agree upon, then sign the more restrictive corporate contract (updating those terms as necessary). Seems like a difficult, but still possible solution, but or course, IANAL.
So, you want to model it on the GPL.
In other words, you want to model your employment contract on a software license which contains some questionable provisions, vague language, and has not been tested in court.
You want to base your personal intellectual freedom and your ability to earn a living on the ivory-tower utopian principles of one RMS.
You do, of course, understand that if RMS had his way, you would be coding for free. You would instead make your money answering support questions for your software or (like him) you would become a tenured professor.
Hmmmm.... Since it's all about information wanting to be free, maybe RMS should offer his courses free of charge. I digress, however.
My point is this: Until all provisions of the GPL are upheld by a court in my locale, I would rather not rely on some boilerplate derivative when my ability to provide for my family is at stake. I would really rather not find out the hard way that provisions which are perfectly acceptable in, say, Kalifornia, are not binding in my state.
In short, I'll trust a local attorney retained on my own dime before I'll turn my career over to some fresh-from-the-bar-exam night law school grad with stars in her eyes and visions of intellectual freedom in her head.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
It really is too bad employers don't see the value in GPLing all of their code so that their competitors could obtain the source. Sick twisted world, isn't it?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
That sounds great, talking about 'freedom,' but if you actually read the GPL, in effect, you could sell only one copy of your software, and everyone else could just copy it. I know that's not the intent of the GPL, but that's the net effect.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Really? It explicitly talks about 'benefit to the company.' There isn't even a really clear allusion to 'your own free time,' but this is about the more general subject of contract terms and their relation to free software. This certainly includes free work done on your own time, but this question actually limits it to the right to contribute to free software projects so long as it benefits the company they work for....
I think that work on free software is great, but it's going to be a very, very hard sell to many, if not most employers. Someone brought up hardware drivers - that's a good way to spread your hardware to more OSs. But for software-only/mainly companies that don't want the service-oriented model of Red Hat and others, which is still quite young and unproven, vs. the (at least so far) more profitable and proven closed-source route, it's no contest.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
It's easy. If you work on a project that does x during the day, any freetime work should be reasonably unrelated to x. It's safer for both parties that way, there's no chance the company will end up with GPLed code in its product, and there's no way the GPL project will end up with code that belongs to somebody else. Furthermore, it gives you a broader experience and a chance to do something different.
How about this: creating/enhancing organizations for open source developers to join. Not just online communities or expos, but not-for-profit outfit(s) specifically made to bring together free software/open source developers, able to provide these general contracts and legal backing. Meeting with a prospective employer, being a member of a well respected organization with some power can have a positive impact.
You'd show open source support and commitment while having legal backing you could never have as an individual. I think it would look and work better than expecting employers to adopt a generic contract from nowhere.
Just a thought on the subject... haven't really though it through.
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Developers: We can use your help.
What incentive does a company have for GPL'ing work that you do that benefits *them*? Obviously, if you work in your spare time on a project like Apache and your company produces children's educational software then a contract that allows (or doesn't disallow) GPL'ing of your software makes sense. But if you work on Apache by night and IIS by day, I think your employer would be very foolish to allow you to do so.
Dancin Santa
This is what I used as a basis for my contract with my employer and it has worked out great so far.
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
If you let that fly, then the employer should also compenstae you for using ideas you had while away from work. I think $25/waking hour should suffice; that's only about $1400/week
Reboot macht Frei.
While the idea of organization is, as an idea, good, I don't think unionizing is really the answer. First, I think that the tech sector as a whole is quickly working its way to becoming saturated with workers, especially after the dot-bomb. With many out of work people, and new, fresh from college, workers, keeping any form of solidarity will be tough when there are more people looking for jobs, and its getting easier for companies to find them. Secondly, I'm not real hot on the idea of handing over a portion of my paycheck to a group and hoping that they can make intelligent decisions, worse yet having them call some sort of strike or action that will make it hard to make my rent, and only as a play for their own megalomaniacal purposes. (e.g. Union control over my pension vs. employer control, its just a power grab.) Thirdly, like most unions this one would probably make it easy for lackluster techs/programmers/etc to get promotions based only on seniority, and as a way of getting them out of the way(after all, you can't fire a union worker, no matter how bad they are, but you can promote them and try to get someone who is more capable.) While I agree that there are some injustices in the field, and I agree that programmers shouldn't be forced to give up their own work(assuming that they are not consuming company resources to make it), I don't see a Union as a good answer. But then, perhaps this would be a different kind of union, though I bet most unions claimed the same thing when they started out. So what is the solution, I don't know. But I'm fairly certain that a union is not it.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.