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?"

Comments

Talk to Tom Hudson

[gmhowell]

Search out the journal of /. user TomHudson for one person's experience with this (ongoing, last I heard).

Re:Talk to Tom Hudson

[adycarter]

http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson/journal/

Sadly I had to resort to Google as slashdot doesnt like searching itself...

Journal enteries related to this are all a fair bit back in his Journal.

Lawyer

[Anonymous Coward]

Get one.

Re:Lawyer

[rbrausse]

Get one.

if you are honestly interested in claiming your copyrights this is the best (and arguable only) way to enforce the license. when you are "only" trying to get this known in the community you could describe the issue at the mailing list of gpl violations.

Re:Lawyer

[beelsebob]

Huh... the poster is asserting that they're distributing his GPLed code as proprietary. That certainly is a violation. But it rests on the fact that it actually is his code to GPL. If he did it while he was at the company, it's theirs. If he did it at home, and then he integrated it into their code without them having a license for it, then they have a pretty good case for saying "either you were screwing the company over or you implicitly licensed this to us".

Re:Lawyer

[Stellian]

if you are honestly interested in claiming your copyrights this is the best (and arguable only) way to enforce the license.

Assuming you actually own that copyright. 99% of the work contracts out there have a clause where you are ceding all intellectual property to the employer. It's so standard that you should always ask for permission from your employer before writing and releasing open source software - you might not have the right to do so, even if the software is not related to the business of your employer and even if developed in your spare time; the language in my contract is unambiguous about that.

Assuming that in this case the permission to write and release open source software was implicit, it still does not mean the company has lost it's control of it's intellectual property - they can always dual-license it under a proprietary license. They can't "take back" the already released GPL software, and they can't grab any contribution of 3rd parties to that lineage, but they can chose to develop the original codebase in an entirely closed source fashion - it's theirs.

So spending 10 minutes to read your contract might save a butt-load of lawyer fees.

Re:Lawyer

[TheGratefulNet]

this. 100% this.

most employment contracts let the company OWN YOUR ASS, even outside of work hours and using your own equipment, even doing work not related to the core business of the company.

I had to turn away job offers (in this economy!) due to their 'we own your ass' language.

during the last year or so, I have been working on my own opensource (both hardware and software; its arduino-based) project. I was also interviewing at various networking companies (my background is network management) and while my DIY audio projects have *nothing* at all to do with netmgt, all the contracts the companies would have me sign allow them to own or take over my projects if there is overlap in employment time and my project time!

believe it. I was somewhat sharp about noticing this (I have no background in legal matters but the contract terms seemed fishy to me) and when I mentioned this to the recruiter I was going thru, he agreed and we tried FOR A MONTH to negotiate some contracts that would allow me to work on my DIY audio hw/sw/fw stuff and not have them own it. we tried being a w2 fulltime employee; and we got a 5 page contract. most items were not acceptable to us. we tried being a direct contractor, that had more pages to it! we tried my working for the recruiter and having him be the actual contractor to the employer. neither side could agree on the other's proposed contract terms.

this went on for a month and finally I was advised to just walk away.

and I did. I still have not found work in quite a long time but at least I do have ownership of my (now shipping) hardware and firmware. I released it, its ftp-able, its copyrighted with headers and my name on it, and at least there wasnt' employer 'time overlap' on any part - ANY - of this project.

but you better believe that any contract that an employer attempts me to sign will TRY to take that project away from me if I even mention I'm working on it.

I have been harping a lot, lately, about software guys needing to unionize, like the turn of the century america. if we DID have a large software workers union, we'd at least have someone on our side to bargain for fair contracts.

right now, you and I have zero 'pull' when it comes to crossing out line items or making revisions on contracts for employment. companies both large and small try to steal your work.

be careful, guys! these days, you are smart to have a laywer look over your employment contract. not that you can alter it, but you can either accept it or walk away. sometimes walking away is the best move (sad to say).

Re:Lawyer

[Matheus]

A company I worked for a while back was purchased shortly after I started working there. The original company had required no NDA/Non-Compete/etc but when the new management came in they distributed new paperwork for all of us to sign (whole company from HR to IT).

I read over this paperwork and it did exactly as you describe. It gave the company complete ownership over anything we did at work or at home, during work hours or during free time. I told our management that I would be unable to sign such a document and my fellow developers and IT agreed.

As it is, IANAL, but the company allowed me to enter into negotiations with the chief legal of the purchasing company. We hammered out a new version of the document that preserved our rights outside of the workplace and off hours. It was this revised version that roughly 30% of our company signed (Basically everyone tech related) and is a somewhat proud moment for yours truly. It is worthy of note: Neither company was inherently a technology company. The business cases actively pursued in no way coincided with any interests we had outside of work. When the negotiation process began I noticed the fairly internet form letter nature of the document and allowed that maybe they didn't intend to be so overly broad in their charge of ownership. I was told quite directly by their legal that the intent was clear and intentional.

Long story short: It is possible to negotiate with a company to preserve your ownership of your own personal pursuits but you must be proactive and generally have leverage (In my case I was holding up a merger with an entire IT/dev department. Your average shmo only has the desire of the company to have them work there). Also expect that the/any company will do whatever they can to own everything you are and do so presume you are screwed and read any documentation you are asked to sign with that intent in mind.

Errm... what?

[Splab]

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.

Not so obvious

[perpenso]

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.

Re:Just fork it

[snowgirl]

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.

Re:Work produced at home is mine

[murdocj]

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.