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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
First paragraph is golden. If the code was at one time released open source, then you can totally fork it.
Second paragraph is however wrong. If the company owns the copyright on the work then they can relicense it all they want, even if it were previously open source.
As per someone noting below: if you want to know your legal rights and what you can do, talk to a lawyer. What you'll get here is a bunch of IANALs telling you bullshit, and IAALbInYl (I Am A Lawyer, but I'm not YOUR lawyer) telling you generic advice that possibly doesn't apply, and that you need to speak to a lawyer who represents your interests.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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.
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.