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What Do I Do About My Ex-Employer Stealing My Free Code?
An anonymous reader writes "I recently found out that the company I used to work for is removing all the open source licenses (GPL and MIT) from my work, distributing it as proprietary software and taking all the credit despite the fact that they contributed nothing to it. They are even renaming it something really silly. What should I do?"
Search out the journal of /. user TomHudson for one person's experience with this (ongoing, last I heard).
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Get one.
So you worked for them and where paid by them. You decided to release something as GPL (your post doesn't say if this was sanctioned by the powers that be), but considering your termination, one would think you stepped out of line?
But, the fact is, you where working for them, earning money producing something *they* own. If they decide to revoke a license on something *they* own, they are squarely in their rights to do so.
Why don't you just fork it from the latest version when it still had the GPL/MIT license and release it in a new project? This should be even easier in your situation, because the company decided to change the name of the software, which means you can simply keep using the old name for the new project. This also doesn't confuse users, as they will probably remember and recognize the software by name.
Once you've got the new project up and running, you can of course sue your old employer for distributing open source licensed software without the proper licence and source code.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Standard practice when hiring any employee is to write a legal agreement stating that any work you do there is "work for hire" and they own the copyright, not you. I *think* this can even be implied just by the fact that you were an employee, Unless you took specific action before writing this code, such as giving the company a specific license, or requireing them to let you contribute it, I think you are the one in *possible* legal danger here. (I am not a lawyer etc blah blah).
This is unfortunate but you need to get over the fact that work-for-hire does not belong to you and drop this quickly. The more you drum up publicity around this the more danger you could be in.
Chalk it up to a learning experience, and take solace in that you know what to do next time.
At the last company I worked with I asked my boss (a SVP level executive good enough for legal purposes) to sign a small contract with me that would allow me to bring in my own open source libraries I had built up over the years in exchange for letting me take code written on company time and contribute it back to the library or to an OSS project. I of course said this would not include anything proprietary to a client or any program as a whole, but rather utilities such as a date converter class or caching system. And that it was at my sole discretion to determine as best I could in good faith what code qualified to be contributed to open source.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
A shark. The sort of guy that makes lesser lawyers wet their pants in fear. Seriously.
With that said: If you worked in the United States and were paid on a W-2 you're basically fucked. Unless you can prove every single keystroke of development on this product was done on "your time" with your own equipment it's almost certainly a work-for-hire under U.S. law, and therefore they own the code, not you.
On the other hand, if you were a 1099 "perma-temp," or selling your services to them as a corporation (i.e. a corp-to-corp arrangement) then who owns the code is an entirely different matter. In that scenario, you would need to look at your contract with them (you did sign a contract, right?) to determine whether you "own" the code you wrote for them. Generally speaking if you're not an employee (and you didn't sign anything giving them rights to your code) then you still own it.
If you live in another country then I have no idea what you should do. Good luck, though. Hate to see people ripped-off by their employer. What this really should be is an object lesson in why any coder with even moderate skill should be insisting on corp-to-corp arrangements. It's extra paperwork for you, and a PITA at tax-time, but if you invent something really revolutionary it's one of the only ways to keep your employer from stealing your idea under the "Work-for-hire" provisions of copyright law.
Of course, as always, IANALBIPOOS.
Who did what now?
IANAL
Also depends on whether or not he did it on a company machine and if his contracts state that any work done on company machines/with company software/etc is company property.
If he did it on his own time, in his house, with his own computer and software, contributed it to oss, and THEN took it for use at the company after that, then probably yeah. He can probably get them to stop it. But if they can prove that either A: It was used by them before it was contributed as OSS aka they can say it is theirs or B: That any of the work done on it was on company property with reasonable doubt (assuming that clause is in their contract) then you sir are SOL.
Welcome to the world of legal tricks and minor clauses. Where a tiny bump in the road can wreck your car.
That very much depends on your contract. My contract clearly states any code written at work (or at home) belongs to the company. If that isn't something you're willing to agree to, don't sign the contract. (I actually had a couple of clauses added to my contract to cover one or two of my projects - which is also something you can do!)
Obvious. Have a lawyer send them a lovely letter telling them to cease and desist. If they do neither... sue the fuckraping bitchpiss out of them. What else?
It is not obvious. Who owns the copyright? He said he was an employee, so *IF* the code was "work product" he may only have had the right to GPL the code as an agent of the company. Since he is no longer with the company he no longer would have such authority. If the company is the copyright holder they are free to "fork" it and go proprietary. It is not clear if the code is employee work product so nothing is obvious.
2.) When you get proof they publish/sell your work you get a lawyer to write them a notice of infringement.
When no 1. never happened you are probably out of luck and only an expensive lawyer could help you.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
FTFS:
I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years. During the last 2 years of that time, I created a simple web framework and contributed it to open source. We had always used open source, so it was high time we became a contributor! Recently I found out that they have removed all of the licenses from the files (GPL and MIT), gave it a silly name, and have the intention of marketing it as a product. What should I do? I am trying to get past the fact that I am upset that I was terminated â" that pissed me off â" but the fact that they are taking credit for my work and making it proprietary is really bothering me! What should I do?
I just might have found the reason for your termination. Were you doing things that went beyond what your employer allowed you to do? You were employed and you were so called 'contributing' code under GPL without your employer explicit permission to do this, and from the text it looks like you have so called 'contributed' the code that you wrote for your employer.
This is like saying: I took this guys stuff and 'contributed' it for the good of the public, but I didn't ask the guy if he is OK with it and now he is forcing everybody to return the stuff I 'contributed' to him and he called the cops. I am really pissed off, what should I do?
Yeah, I think I did find the reason for your termination.
You can't handle the truth.
I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years. During the last 2 years of that time, I created a simple web framework and contributed it to open source. We had always used open source, so it was high time we became a contributor!
I think the key part of that was the first line of his statement on his site. "I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years."
So, he says right there, that he worked for the company day in and day out. There was no segregated personal time.
He appears to freely admit that he worked on company time. The project was made available during company time. It's also quite likely that he used company resources to develop, advertise, and distribute the project.
The first reply on his own site, dated two days ago, gives the correct answer. Contact a lawyer. They were kind enough to guide him in a helpful direction. I'm sure his employers already discussed the matter with their attorneys.
It basically comes down to this. If you worked on it while you were employed for a company, the project belongs to them. If you worked on it in your free time, with absolutely no company assets or backing, *AND* you have documentation to prove that, you have a chance.
I was told by the COO at one employer that he ran into exactly that. His previous employer sued on the grounds that the project was done on company time, even though it was while he was off the clock. Those fuzzy gray areas don't matter much when it's a project that isn't going anywhere, and it's not interfering with company time or assets. The moment you sent an email from work, logged in to write some code, or even mentioned it on work time, they have grounds to say it belongs to them.
I had one employer who was very much confused by this though. I did send an email up to the Apache group years ago, and my change was reflected in the code. I don't know if it was because of me, or someone else. It was a pretty trivial change to help in high load environments. My bosses thought that since I had written part of Apache, they owned it in some sort of way. It took me a while to get them to understand that they only "owned" my couple lines of code, and it wasn't clear if they used my code or someone else's.
Needless to say, since you haven't heard of me or the company I worked for, suing the Apache group, I managed to get them to understand. It took a while though. They also thought we owned part of Sendmail, because I was always tweeking our configuration.
What they did get me on was an internet mapping project that I was working on. I wasn't trying to find every branch out to every backwater nowhere, it only looked at the important nodes where traffic was funneled through. I worked on it after-hours, but I did the preliminary demonstration on their web servers. I didn't personally have web servers in 4 different states, but they did. This was before the average Joe was hosting his site for cheap, and most of us were still on dialup unless we were working out of the office. Their lawyer was kind enough to offer me a percentage of the profits. When he spelled out the terms of that, it was clear that they had absolutely no intention of paying me anything ever. Beyond that, if the project were not to be profitable, I would be responsible for my percentage of the losses, which would come out of my paycheck.
I ran into a "technical problem" a few days later, which was never resolved. Eventually the domain (which I had paid for) expired, and later on we pruned the site as a dead hosting site. Since there were no costs incurred by the company, they couldn't take anything from me. They did try to get the "hosting fee", which I calculated out based on the usage by all the sites over a period. Those pesky sites with over 1 million hits/day really overwhelmed the little site with just 3 IP's ever looking at it. I offered to write them a check for $0.35. I was feeling generous. They weren't really very entertained.
The moral of my story? Don't work on it during work time. Don't involve it with work at all. Work under a pseudonym, or under the name of a trusted friend. If it becomes something, cool. If not, it can die quietly without involving lawyers. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I not only RTFA, I also read the comments.
And to the OP, I say: tread carefully. Not only is there a possibility that your work would be considered "work for hire" (and hence not yours to decide how to license), you should be careful about making threats. Saying things like:
I’m going to report this to GNU project and warn them that if they don’t bring to code back in-line with the license, that I will send a letter to their customers to make them aware of the situation.
To me, that reads an awful lot like extortion. Not only is that not going to win any friends with your former employer (So what if they fired you? For all you know you'll run into the same people again in the future, don't give them a reason to fire you again), publicly announcing this as your intention is a really bad idea when you've just been sacked and are looking for work.
The OP also said, in response to the first guy who asked pretty much everything that has been asked here in the slashdot thread:
Hi Llama, I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the company’s full support. They knew it was open source. I think now that I’m not at the company, they want to “control” it. As far as I understand it, they need to abide by the license. I think the tricky part is compelling them to abide by the license
Assuming this is all true (that he had no agreement with the company to cede over his rights to work done on his own time), I seriously doubt that it is legal for the company to do this. It seems to me that he was pretty careful from the outset to ensure that no such agreement was in the contract -- and in that case, by default, the copyright remains with him as the original author.
I’m going to report this to GNU project and warn them that if they don’t bring to code back in-line with the license, that I will send a letter to their customers to make them aware of the situation.
To me, that reads an awful lot like extortion.
How exactly is this extortion? Mere coercion is not extortion. He's not asking for money, property or services in exchange for all of this -- he just wants the source code (assuming it's rightfully his) to be licensed properly and that the company may not sell it as proprietary.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
suck it up, and write some new code.
You guys? Not so much.
So by your argument, an employee at Microsoft could publish the entire Windows source code as GPL and Microsoft would have no way of pulling that back?
Try again mister...
If you are the original copyright holder and publish under GPL, then that publication remains so, but you can always choose to re license your work. However, if you did not condone the release as GPL, then it sure as hell can be revoked.
The author changes his story, he stated early that it was done as a we in the company, therefore, it belongs to the company - that statement alone will cause him to lose any trial.
Right, no other profession except every other profession that consists of creating copyrightable work such as musicians, sculptors, photographers, authors, actors, and so on.
Except it doesn't sound like it's the case here. It sounds like this guy wrote code for the company, in which case it doesn't matter whether he worked at home, at the office, or at 37,000 feet, it belongs to the company, and he had no right to put any particular license on it.
I was refuting a specific claim. This is a separate claim which I do not dispute. Since the facts relevant to this point are not available to us, I cannot form a proper opinion.
The poster says "I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years. During the last 2 years of that time, I created a simple web framework and contributed it to open source. " It doesn't sound like it's derivative of GPL, it sounds like he created some code for the company and put GPL on it. In which case the code belongs to the company, and they are free to take it in-house any time they want.
You are a professional? Then act like one.
1st of all: Don't get all worked up. Nobody cares squat about your or your former employers web framework, of which there are literally thousands out there. Take the best parts of it, refactor them and contribute them to Zend, Symfony, Cake, Joomla, Drupal, Typo3 or some other big-time project that actually matters (asuming you wrote it in PHP) or something simular for the language chosen. If your Framework is worth anything, you'll be able to do that quickly and join the coreteam of some big-time FOSS webkit in no time and your credit will gain in weeks by orders of magnitude compared to working semi-free for some crappy freeloading web-outfit nobody has ever heard of for the last 5 years.
2nd: If they paid you to write it, chances are they own it, and can do with it as they like.
3rd: If you wrote it on their contract and in your free time and commited significant parts of goodwill into it without getting paid, chances are it's legally dual-licenced ... or some equivalent of that. That means they can do with it whatever they want and you can go on and continue publishing it however you please.
But once again: Nobody gives a shit, so I wouldn't risk legal action from some small-business asshole I once was dealing with if they discover you and think it's sporting to go after some sorry-ass developer who has even less money and power than they. Unless, that is, you have money and time to spare and like to send a small private army of lawyers of yours their way - for fun or profit or both. In that case, be my guest, fetch a lawyer or two and sue them into next wednesday. And please keep us posted on our blog. I, in that case, for one, am going to sit back in my deckchair, grab a bag of popcorn and watch with joyfull glee and delight as some sleazy web-sweatshop gets what they deserve as they are gutted and torn to chunky kibbles by a righfully enraged FOSS deveper. :-) ...
Yet again: Since I guess you've got neither money or extra time to spare, I'd let it be, cover my ass with legal statements on your ownage of the code from some buddies in case they want to get pissy with you in the future and then just carry on with your life. Preferably as a core member of some larger web project actually doing something usefull.
My 2 cents.
FYI: I too developed a FOSS product for a partner pulling in big time projects. We published it as FOSS and, since they brought in fair money, I agreed to dual-licence the code, which they didn't understand at the time. When we parted, they rebranded the product, removed my name, claimed an advancement over the old version - which didn't exsist, aside from a new logo and a flashy website - and disappeared into insignificance two years later. The codebase still is GPL 3 and I'm ready to continue with the product whenever I feel like it. I have witnesses to back my claims should anyone come after me. Which I really don't expect to happen, since I'm halfway cool and professional with my former partners. And I'd redo the codebase completely anyway if I should ever consider picking it up again.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's true. He is also free to continue pushing the GPLed version that has already been released. You cannot retroactively de-GPL code.
Of course if there are patents in play then you can effectively discourage people from using GPL code...
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Assuming he had the right to GPL the code at all. The company can just say he did it without permission, and never owned the rights to the code in the first place. OP won't win this fight.
Only if he was legally entitled to release that code.
Because if he released it and it wasn't his to do so, the GPL license itself is null and void for that project, and standard copyright would apply to that project.
If it was not his right to release that code, not only should he STFU, but he may well bring legal problems on himself, and burn his career in the process.
You forgot raping their women and enslaving their children.
Then the pillaging and the burning.
And at the end, you sow the ground with salt so that nothing will ever grow there again in our lifetimes.
That'll teach them.
But "we" did become a contributor, according to his story the code ended up being GPL/MIT. In any case, whether it's "we should" or "we did", it's still "we" - which in both cases imply the employer ("we") had an ownership interest in the code. As for "day and night", it's you my friend who are stretching too far. "Working day and night" is a very common English idiom that means without stopping - 100% effort - either literally or hyperbolically - see e.g. http://dictionary.reference.com/idioms/night+and+day -this is even a recommended phrase in resume writing courses, because it shows commitment to working hard, and putting 100% effort into it. If he was putting 100% into his employment, when did he write the framework independently? In any case, I've asked him to clarify some of these less clear details on his blog, so we'll see what he says - that is if he doesn't moderate out my comment.
You didn't read the article, did you? Author was contracted, not employed; the work in question was done on his own time. Your condemnation is out of line.
(I actually had a couple of clauses added to my contract to cover one or two of my projects - which is also something you can do!)
Exactly. I have had to sign some fairly silly contracts to get jobs, but in every case it's been a relatively trivial matter to get management approval for exceptions. Companies are generally just trying to cover their collective butts with these kinds of contracts, they don't actually want to own your every thought (well they might want to, but they know it's harder to keep employees that way, especially skilled employees). Go to your manager and say "Boss, I'm working on an open source (or proprietary for my own personal gain) software stack to do "blah", would you mind signing this exception to my contract?"
9/10 times your boss will sign the paper and you're all clear (at least if you work for reasonable people, which I try to make a point of doing). Now obviously if you ask him to sign off on you working on a direct competitor or something you'll have issues; but otherwise it's just a matter of a little forward planning, knowing what you've already signed, etc.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
If the author has not given the copyright to the company and surrendering his own copyright, he still retains copyright. Notice that we're using the word author.
If he released the code he authored in his spare time as GPL, the company cannot de-GPL that. By assumption he implicitly gave the company copyrights to use the work. That does not give them the power to suppress the other copyright owner.
This page talks about joint copyright ownership.
We can only assume there was no explicit agreement between the OP and his employer, hence he is the true copyright owner. In a joint copyright situation like this, I guess the company has the right to relicence its own GPL code as proprietary but it cannot suppress the GPL in the wild because that was under the author's copyright.
It's scary when we use the word author to describe an author who has no rights over what he has produced.
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Only if the company asserted ownership at the time of creation. At my current employer, they were very specific during the hiring process that they do not assert ownership of any code we generate, but they do assert total ownership of all data our code touches. So that if we want to take our frameworks opensource, we can, but we obviously can't push data, even if it's just config data.
Every other location I've worked at though has had a contract in place for declaring ownership of everything we touch while on the clock, on the network, or on their hardware.
No contract, no ownership. If he signed ownership of his work over, it's their code, not his. If he didn't, it's still his. At that point though, you'll need a lawyer to prove it as the strength of your copyright/patent/trademark is only as strong as the court finds it.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Such a union is completely unnecessary. It's really simple: Don't agree to bullshit contracts. Cross things out, walk away if the potential employer won't accept that.
I'd be rather skeptical that such a contract would be enforceable in court anyway, since it is just another potential means for the company to go after you if you siphoned-off their intellectual property or worked on their nickel for your own stuff. When you sign something like that, it makes it that much harder for you to claim something as your own unless you can prove it was all original work, done on your own time, and with your own resources. Any grey areas, and they probably do have a claim to your work. It's like a non-compete agreement, which are probably not worth defending unless there's an egregious violation of trust (e.g., the departing employee stealing clients).
That aside, it's really on the individual to look out for his own interests. This is the only point I agree with Ayn Rand's diatribes on-- a limited application of rational self interest. That's the rationale behind unions, but it isn't limited to a union framework. It behooves every working individual to determine his/her own value and to refuse to accept less or sell-out in unconscionable ways. I have outright laughed at laughable job offers, and I would sooner work in retail for $8/hr than disrespect myself and damage my profession working for $12/hr in an IT job that really should be paying well over $20/hour. Some poor, desperate fools do that, rather than holding out for a fair wage, I'm sure of it. Unions are really just a way of enforcing the situation where nobody can be stupid and sell-out everyone else because its an all-or-none contract.
There is a reason that unions tend to be limited to labor & vocational trades and not professions. Anyone thinking IT is suitable for unionization should consider that it's much harder to quantify professional work and qualifications, but unions rely on standardizing the worker and then basing a contract off that. Each worker must fit exactly in the mold. That means everyone is assumed to have the same level of skills (based on the level of seniority and training), excellence, and overall productivity. That's why "not my job" is the Union mantra-- you must do your job and you WILL be punished for doing more than what your contract allows you to do. IT is really specialized and so many folks wear so many hats, I wouldn't see that working well, and while the protections of a contract are nice to have, they limit your freedom to set your own value and to actually just get your job done. It's really much better to have associations of individuals that let them compare notes and encourage everyone to do right by themselves and by their colleagues, but without being bound by union rules.
Personally, one thing I always do during an interview is check on the company's IP policies. All companies I have worked for have thus far can be summarized by the following:
any work done on using company resources (time, equipment, etc.) belongs to the company
However, some employers (and academic institutions) take anything you create in any manner while you are employed with them (or are a student at the institution).
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a history of providing legal assistance in GPL violation cases.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
IANAL, but I don't think he has a leg to stand on. His claim appears baseless to me.
Everyplace I've worked has an employment agreement which all coders must sign, and which cedes all rights to all software they develop during the term of their employment. Such agreements usually contain a way for new hires to declare pre-existing projects they were working on beforehand, but I'm presuming that he never declared this project. In which case, the software belongs to the company entirely and they can do whatever they want with it.
The code author may have been a contractor rather than an employee (it's hard to tell because he omits important details on his blog). If he was a contractor, then he still signed an agreement with the company, and whatever he did is still their property.
It even seems possible that they can revoke the GPL license if they wish. He says on his blog: "We had always used open source, so it was high time we became a contributor!" which suggests that he made the decision to attach a GPL license by himself, on his own authority, even though he was not the copyright holder. In which case, the GPL license document was invalid, and the software was never really licensed under GPL. Especially if he was a contractor, in which case no employee of the company has ever released the software as GPL, or attached a GPL license document to it.
Of course I'm not a lawyer and he should hire one if he wishes to pursue this, but if I were him I'd just drop it.