One Approach To Open Source Code Contribution and Testing

An anonymous reader writes "Brian Aker, one of the core developers of MySQL, has written up a lengthy blog on how the Drizzle fork is handling both its code contributions and its testing. He has listed the tools they use and how they work with their processes. He also makes an interesting statement about the signing of corporate code-contribution agreements and how there are some, including Rasmus (creator of PHP), who refuse to sign them."

Comments

all-your-code-is-ours

[Red Flayer]

I don't write code anymore. At all. It's not my source of income, and I value other hobbies higher.

Yet I refused to sign an all-your-code-belongs-to-us agreement at my current employer, and almost didn't get the job because of it. The HR red-tape machine couldn't deal with a process exception, so the CFO of the company had to step in to resolve the issue on their end with their legal team.

The reason I'm sharing it is this: the clueless HR drones are the ones enforcing the sign-it-or-go-away policy. If you're worth your salt, and the company management is good, they'll make exceptions. And from a principles point of view, you probably shouldn't work from a company that wants to enslave you.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[internerdj]

And from a principles point of view, you probably shouldn't work from a company that wants to enslave you.
While this is nice in principle, nearly every company wants to enslave you and even those that don't want you to sign similar slips of paper to work for them. I love my job and they really don't want to enslave me, but when I came in I didn't have the leverage to not sign. Good for you that you were but for the rest of us: Odds are they won't bother with following through with something like that unless a) it is in competition (or perceived competition) with the company or b) it is interfering with your performance or c) they can leverage it into something that would rake in large profits with little expenditure.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded.

When I came to work for my current employer, there was an ambiguously worded section that could be taken to mean that they owned any code I wrote whether at work, or on my own time. I talked to the divisional controller and had a clarifying statement inserted to put a division between work done on the company dime, and anything I did outside of that. They didn't have any problem with that, and it hasn't negatively impacted my working relationship with anyone here.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[internerdj]

Also on an interesting note, I had to sign an all-your-creative-work-are-belong-to-us agreement for my employer. When I went back for my Master's Degree my agreement to the student handbook essentially said all my submitted work was the school's property. Contractually I don't think I had the right to sign over those works to the school because I've already signed them over to my company. I wonder how that works for TurnItIn.com. Theoretically they now have materials in their database that I never had the rights to give them and my company could legally demand those materials be purged. Sure it won't happen and would put me in a legal bind I'm sure but it is interesting.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[gbjbaanb]

yes, very interesting.

If a court upholds the agreement you had that all your code belongs to the first contracted party, then all we need to do in future is to sign a legal agreement that all-your-creative-work-are-belong-to-us with your mum before you join a new company.

If they side with the later, then join, and then sign with your mum :)

If they agree with both parties... then neither have rights to the code that each has the rights to... if my head stops spinning, I think that means its all a load of unenforceable bo**ocks. Sign the agreement with your mum anyway.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[Bromskloss]

Your school-versus-work situation made me remember that of a PhD student at my university. His PhD studies are financed by a company and at the start of the project, the university apparently signed over, to the company, the rights to any inventions that might come about as a result of the students work. However, and the company should have known this, according to Swedish law, the rights to the invention belongs to the researcher himself, not his university. So as far as I understand, the financing company sits happliy awaiting inventions they will not get.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[mcrbids]

I'm an employer.

I'm going to offer good pay, full-time schedule, excellent (expensive!) medical/health benefits, a courteous and comfortable work environment, and in exchange, I want you to work for me. I have no desire to pay you to start up a competing company - do that on your own dime like I did. I don't care if you want to build a PHP thingie that keeps track of your MP3 collection, but if you come up with a useful idea while working on our products and decide to keep it for yourself rather than provide it, that would piss me off - it's my dime that you developed it with!

I'm not asking you to never work for anyone else, I really don't care much what you do after you quit. But while you're working for me, I do expect you to (ahem) work for me.

Really, what is wrong with that arrangement?

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[ezzzD55J]

I want you to work for me. I have no desire to pay you to start up a competing company - do that on your own dime like I did.

I don't get it. What you pay him is his own dime.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[Xtifr]

I refused to sign an all-your-code-belongs-to-us agreement at my current employer, and almost didn't get the job because of it.

They almost always have a place for you to fill in exemptions for code/inventions you already owned before coming to work for them. As a Debian developer, I always just fill in "Debian GNU/Linux" in the exemption spot, and no one has ever objected, despite the fact that that's a hole big enough to drive a dozen web servers, eight web browsers, thirty-two Content Management Systems, four word processors, seventy-five programmer's editors, nine complete GUI toolkits, thirty-six programming languages, four hundred and seventy three games of varying quality, twenty-one window managers, forty-five email clients, a partridge in a pear tree*, and Goddess knows what else through. I used to try to explain the truly massive implications of those three simple words, but everyone (HR, manager or engineer) always said, "that's fine, we don't have a problem with it", so I stopped bothering.

Of course, it may help that I'm in California where employee rights laws are generally pretty strong.

* all numbers just guesses--I actually think that Debian may have three partridges in pear trees somewhere in its repositories.

Re:all-your-code-is-ours

[jonwil]

If you are paying me to come into an office every day and write code for you, you own the stuff I do whilst I am in the office and you are paying me. You should NOT have any claim to the ideas I work on when I am not in the office and being paid by you. If you want to claim ownership of the ideas I have on the weekend when I am not being paid by you, forget it.

If I signed a code-contribution agreement

[Monkeedude1212]

Saying that anything I invent or discover (or along those lines) during my time working at my company - and in my spare time I decide to make Flash games...

Does that make my hobby-work belongs to a company that holds no interest in it? If it gets sponsored on a website could they claim rights?

There, fixed it for you

[ClosedSource]

"The powerless HR employees ..."

Don't blame individuals for a systemic problem.

Re:There, fixed it for you

[Red Flayer]

My experience is, from stints at four employers (two of those very long stints) in the tech industry, is that the HR drones are, in fact, clueless. HR clerkdom is where you put employees you don't want to fire, but can't cut the mustard in other areas. Maybe this is a function of my previous employers... but I've seen it too many times to think it's not a normal situation.

Yes, the problem is systemic. But clueless HR drones do, indeed, hinder resolution by not escalating when required, by not knowing how to handle exceptions.

Interestingly, my one non-tech-industry employer did not have this problem. HR clerkdom was where they screened raw graduates for promotion to other departments, mostly as admins. If they weren't up and running well in 60 days, they got canned. That HR department was a pleasure to work with... all the fresh hires new to escalate immediately on process exceptions.

Re:Really?

[MightyMartian]

There are number of sad, pathetic people out there who, having no lives to speak of, being universally reviled by their parents, peers and people of the opposite sex, replace those normal human desires with an obsession for trolling various groups. In a proper world, these people would be given plenty of counseling, drugs to stabilize their deteriorating mental condition and rehabilitated so that they could become useful members of society. In our world, however, they should have a two hundred pound lead weight tied to their ankles, and then dropped over the nearest bridge.

Emoticons

[AltImage]

Is it really necessary to have 6 smilie faces in the article? I wonder how many also show up in the Drizzle source. I also find it interesting that the author opts for the less common "no-nose smilie face" :)

Marketing

[Ukab the Great]

A drizzle is a display of rain that is rather unimpressive. Also, it's a prelude to heavy rain and getting soaked and miserable. On the Drizzle website is a picture of a rainy cloud, which at least in western cultures is an image associated with things that are unhappy.

At this point in their project I think that some smart marketing is more important than nitpicking over code.

Re:Marketing

[Jacques Chester]

I believe it's meant to be a pun on "cloud computing". So it'll seem especially stupid in 12 months from now when "dust storm 3.0" is the Next Big Thing.