It helps a lot if the company has obvious boundaries. There's a security desk you have to walk past, badge in. You don't actually take the company's computer home with you (laptops make this part fuzzy). You track your hours in a form that would be legally binding in court (even if you are salaried/exempt!). It becomes very hard for anyone to say that work was done within certain boundaries when there is evidence that it was not. Things can get pretty uncomfortable for an employer when evidence comes out that a employee worked a lot of unreported time, because even in the case of salaried employees, folks like Social Security still want a piece of the action.
The point is, if you're the one claiming that something was done "on your own time, in your own space", you need to consider the possibility that the burden will fall on you to prove it.
Best thing to do is to do this work as your own corporate entity. Once it's under specific terms of another contract with a different corporation (your own S-Corp or LLC or whatever!), it becomes much less trivial for a company to sue you for damages, since you'll be able to come to the table with real evidence, instead of the "nothing" that this blog entry represents.
"Full support" to me would have to mean "the company gave permission in writing to distribute this work under a specific open source license."
Trouble is, if the company had the right to give that permission, it also means the OP doesn't have a leg to stand on in the first place.
If the company *didn't* have the right to give that permission, what's not clear is what license, if any, the company has to the work. Obviously there's a default conclusion that the work was done for hire, that the company has the copyright, and even though they are being slimy with their internal version they are at least being gracious enough to not interfere with the GPL fork.
"Sanctioned by the powers that be" would imply that they had the right to release the work under the GPL, which means that THEY had the copyright in the first place. In order for the OP to prevail, it sounds like he needs to show that the company had *no* rights to the copyright on this code -- that he granted it to them under some specific license (GPL or otherwise), that HE is the author and copyright owner, and basically he is asserting that they have no rights save the ones he has granted.
>I just checked tfa, it turns out he did write this on his own time.
According to him. I'm inclined to believe him, but then, I'm not a party. It all comes down to burdens of proof. Since the company doesn't actually appear to be trying to stop him from distributing his work, it's hard to say what the damage is. In any case you're accepting his story without any evidence.
What else? Have all the evidence you would need to firmly convince a lay person that specific rights have been abridged. Once you can do that, and I mean *really* do that, where a reasonable lay person (one slightly biased toward the company!) will accept your side and will agree that you have damages that can be compensated for, then the costs of "having a lawyer" will diminish dramatically and your chances for success will increase.
Probably a good idea to stop short of actually accusing them of a crime.
If you are the author of something, and someone else claims that you are not, copyright might do a fair job of protecting your interest (but you might end up with nothing more than an acknowledgement, one that only insiders would ever see anyway.) If you are the author of something and someone simply infringes, copyright doesn't make a very good weapon to use against them unless you have very strong and very specific evidence, and even then your expectations are low.
Here is not a case of a company going to the courts and saying that the author of a GPL project is not really the author, taking credit for the author's work, and seeking to have the author deprived of his authorship by court order. Copyright law would give the author a fighting chance in that case. But what's really happening is a company is using work that they believe they have a right to use, without attribution and without responsibility to the author. Because the author himself put this company in a position where they could do that, he shoulders some of the responsibility for the end result.
What I'm wondering is how the guy knows so much about what's going on behind the closed doors of his former employer. I wonder about his source, and considering how slimy the company is being, I wonder what kind of risks that source is taking to disclose this sort of information in the first place. That kind of thing could turn out to be a bigger deal than the software license violation.
Very few people are at all opposed to healthcare in the hands of the government. Where do you get that idea? Even in the US where "everyone" is opposed to government being involved in healthcare, health programs collectively account for one of the largest parts of the federal budget. I can only assume this is a result of the consensus will of the people. Some government healthcare programs are "good' (e.g., Medicare, the VA, the FDA, the DEA), some are "bad" (e.g., Medicaid and anything approved of by anyone in the current Democratic party). But I don't see any universal opposition to government involvement in healthcare.
The problem I'm seeing is with a perception of health care costs, where there are certain classes of people who are able to take advantage of employer-provided healthcare (people working for mid- to large corporations in salaried positions) and then there are all the rest (people working for those same corporations as hourly employees or contractors, people working for smaller companies, small business owners, and the unemployed). One person might be getting a prescription filled for a $10 co-pay, and another person is expected to pay $400 for the same thing (and ends up not getting it at all). One person might be getting a payroll deduction of $95 for a health plan that another would have to pay $750 a month for (and also ends up not doing it at all).
I'm not making an argument with respect to "government" in health care. I actually think that *employers* should *all* get out of the healthcare business so that the playing field is leveled for everyone, not just for a shrinking privileged class of a certain kind of employee who gets health benefits.
The worst-paid doctors are working for no larger reward than student loan forgiveness, with no higher aspirations than being debt free by their early 50s.
Plenty of users pay for Gmail. Valuable Consideration is exchanged in return for services. Does that make it more interesting? Did any one else join G+ on their (paid for) corporate Gmail identity? I did, and was creative with my job title. So I'm in violation of the TOS and could lose access to a professional email address and documents that my employer pays for.
The cost of Redbox is in the latency of the return process. I simply won't do it. I won't stand in line to do it. Even without a line, it's too long a process. The price is irrelevant.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription over *much* less. Strike one was when they charged me for a disc that I did return. (You don't get a strike two or a strike three with me.)
I'm willing to bet they are knowingly gambling on a scenario where they provoke a certain amount of churn -- and that the formula works out so that the revenue lost from the subscribers who cancel is compensated by the increased revenue from those who don't. There's likely a lot more to it than just that. Those who don't quit over the price increase are also the very same customers who will tend to be receptive to upsells and value-added services and so on. There could even be significant value in having a customer list of people who didn't bail at a price increase. In fact I *know* that list would be worth a fortune to anyone selling anything toward any demographic.
The gold standard for archiving (distinct from backup) is LTO-4 tape. I know this is expensive. I know that a lot of people go "ewww, tape, STFU grampa", but you should have a serious look at the efficiency of SAS tape drives, the simplicity of the solution for really large amounts of archival data, and the reliability of the medium.
The thing that strikes me the most about this story is that Oppenheimer and his folks would either be using pencils or fountain pens. What's interesting is the paper napkin that would have been useful with a Parker 51 or whatever.
Anecdotes about things being done on "rolls of toilet paper" often turn out to have a kernel of truth rooted in the cheaply acquired (read "stolen") teletype paper, which in those days was much easier to obtain than sheets of typing paper.
I was deeply disappointed with the libraries at Stanford. It influenced my decision not to go to work there. That and the $50K salary they were offering.
Seriously, I don't care if someone guesses or bruteforces a password to some news site, or anything where I've used a totally random pseudonym in the first place. I will do things like use weak passwords, re-use them, etc. Because I don't care. I mean, I *really* don't care. Please hack these. Who cares? Not me.
Web sites and applications where I *do* care, get particularly long, entropy-rich randomly generated passwords. These passwords do get stored locally, on a well-encrypted medium that I would be most happy to surrender at the first hint of torture. But these aren't going to be casually guessed, and if you're trying to brute force one of these accounts, you're much better off attacking the next one over. (I take the same strategy with auto and home security as well -- all I really have to do is make YOUR car look more attractive to thieves.)
Well, I doubt they are "against their will" in any legally meaningful sense. You do sign a contract when you make the purchase, and it's normally part of a deed restriction. What I wish more people would try to do would be to get to the table and then get to a point in the negotiation (all contracts ready to sign, money is in the escrow account, the transaction is for cash, etc.), where the one sticking point is that the selling party needs to strike this HoA covenant. I would go as far as to say that if they _can't_ do that, the property isn't actually theirs to sell. I wonder if anyone has ever walked away from an otherwise closed real estate deal on the basis of not being exempted from an HoA.
Slashdot Mirror
>Yeah? So? We're going on the assumption that the OP is the copyright holder - he owns the copyright by virtue of writing the code in the first place.
He has evidence that can support his defense in a criminal court? If he had that, he wouldn't be in such a weak position to start with.
It helps a lot if the company has obvious boundaries. There's a security desk you have to walk past, badge in. You don't actually take the company's computer home with you (laptops make this part fuzzy). You track your hours in a form that would be legally binding in court (even if you are salaried/exempt!). It becomes very hard for anyone to say that work was done within certain boundaries when there is evidence that it was not. Things can get pretty uncomfortable for an employer when evidence comes out that a employee worked a lot of unreported time, because even in the case of salaried employees, folks like Social Security still want a piece of the action.
The point is, if you're the one claiming that something was done "on your own time, in your own space", you need to consider the possibility that the burden will fall on you to prove it.
Best thing to do is to do this work as your own corporate entity. Once it's under specific terms of another contract with a different corporation (your own S-Corp or LLC or whatever!), it becomes much less trivial for a company to sue you for damages, since you'll be able to come to the table with real evidence, instead of the "nothing" that this blog entry represents.
"Full support" to me would have to mean "the company gave permission in writing to distribute this work under a specific open source license."
Trouble is, if the company had the right to give that permission, it also means the OP doesn't have a leg to stand on in the first place.
If the company *didn't* have the right to give that permission, what's not clear is what license, if any, the company has to the work. Obviously there's a default conclusion that the work was done for hire, that the company has the copyright, and even though they are being slimy with their internal version they are at least being gracious enough to not interfere with the GPL fork.
"Sanctioned by the powers that be" would imply that they had the right to release the work under the GPL, which means that THEY had the copyright in the first place.
In order for the OP to prevail, it sounds like he needs to show that the company had *no* rights to the copyright on this code -- that he granted it to them under some specific license (GPL or otherwise), that HE is the author and copyright owner, and basically he is asserting that they have no rights save the ones he has granted.
>In that case if they agreed to it being GPL'd they can make and sell a commercial fork, but cannot stop anyone from using the original version.
Are they doing that? The OP doesn't say they are doing that, does he?
>I just checked tfa, it turns out he did write this on his own time.
According to him. I'm inclined to believe him, but then, I'm not a party. It all comes down to burdens of proof. Since the company doesn't actually appear to be trying to stop him from distributing his work, it's hard to say what the damage is. In any case you're accepting his story without any evidence.
What else? Have all the evidence you would need to firmly convince a lay person that specific rights have been abridged. Once you can do that, and I mean *really* do that, where a reasonable lay person (one slightly biased toward the company!) will accept your side and will agree that you have damages that can be compensated for, then the costs of "having a lawyer" will diminish dramatically and your chances for success will increase.
Probably a good idea to stop short of actually accusing them of a crime.
If you are the author of something, and someone else claims that you are not, copyright might do a fair job of protecting your interest (but you might end up with nothing more than an acknowledgement, one that only insiders would ever see anyway.) If you are the author of something and someone simply infringes, copyright doesn't make a very good weapon to use against them unless you have very strong and very specific evidence, and even then your expectations are low.
Here is not a case of a company going to the courts and saying that the author of a GPL project is not really the author, taking credit for the author's work, and seeking to have the author deprived of his authorship by court order. Copyright law would give the author a fighting chance in that case. But what's really happening is a company is using work that they believe they have a right to use, without attribution and without responsibility to the author. Because the author himself put this company in a position where they could do that, he shoulders some of the responsibility for the end result.
What I'm wondering is how the guy knows so much about what's going on behind the closed doors of his former employer. I wonder about his source, and considering how slimy the company is being, I wonder what kind of risks that source is taking to disclose this sort of information in the first place. That kind of thing could turn out to be a bigger deal than the software license violation.
They get to use ellipses to imply dramatic things without saying them?
I dare you to try that trick in court!
Very few people are at all opposed to healthcare in the hands of the government. Where do you get that idea? Even in the US where "everyone" is opposed to government being involved in healthcare, health programs collectively account for one of the largest parts of the federal budget. I can only assume this is a result of the consensus will of the people. Some government healthcare programs are "good' (e.g., Medicare, the VA, the FDA, the DEA), some are "bad" (e.g., Medicaid and anything approved of by anyone in the current Democratic party). But I don't see any universal opposition to government involvement in healthcare.
The problem I'm seeing is with a perception of health care costs, where there are certain classes of people who are able to take advantage of employer-provided healthcare (people working for mid- to large corporations in salaried positions) and then there are all the rest (people working for those same corporations as hourly employees or contractors, people working for smaller companies, small business owners, and the unemployed). One person might be getting a prescription filled for a $10 co-pay, and another person is expected to pay $400 for the same thing (and ends up not getting it at all). One person might be getting a payroll deduction of $95 for a health plan that another would have to pay $750 a month for (and also ends up not doing it at all).
I'm not making an argument with respect to "government" in health care. I actually think that *employers* should *all* get out of the healthcare business so that the playing field is leveled for everyone, not just for a shrinking privileged class of a certain kind of employee who gets health benefits.
The worst-paid doctors are working for no larger reward than student loan forgiveness, with no higher aspirations than being debt free by their early 50s.
Plenty of users pay for Gmail. Valuable Consideration is exchanged in return for services. Does that make it more interesting? Did any one else join G+ on their (paid for) corporate Gmail identity? I did, and was creative with my job title. So I'm in violation of the TOS and could lose access to a professional email address and documents that my employer pays for.
Are they "secret" loans, or is it just that the details are private?
The cost of Redbox is in the latency of the return process. I simply won't do it. I won't stand in line to do it. Even without a line, it's too long a process. The price is irrelevant.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription over *much* less. Strike one was when they charged me for a disc that I did return. (You don't get a strike two or a strike three with me.)
I'm willing to bet they are knowingly gambling on a scenario where they provoke a certain amount of churn -- and that the formula works out so that the revenue lost from the subscribers who cancel is compensated by the increased revenue from those who don't. There's likely a lot more to it than just that. Those who don't quit over the price increase are also the very same customers who will tend to be receptive to upsells and value-added services and so on. There could even be significant value in having a customer list of people who didn't bail at a price increase. In fact I *know* that list would be worth a fortune to anyone selling anything toward any demographic.
>3. When faced with archers, an unshielded fighter takes it in the arms and torso more than anywhere else.
At what SCA events did you have live archery fighting?
The gold standard for archiving (distinct from backup) is LTO-4 tape. I know this is expensive. I know that a lot of people go "ewww, tape, STFU grampa", but you should have a serious look at the efficiency of SAS tape drives, the simplicity of the solution for really large amounts of archival data, and the reliability of the medium.
The thing that strikes me the most about this story is that Oppenheimer and his folks would either be using pencils or fountain pens. What's interesting is the paper napkin that would have been useful with a Parker 51 or whatever.
I carry a Rhodia A5 and a Lamy Safari with me everywhere I go. Everywhere.
Anecdotes about things being done on "rolls of toilet paper" often turn out to have a kernel of truth rooted in the cheaply acquired (read "stolen") teletype paper, which in those days was much easier to obtain than sheets of typing paper.
Uh, won't that achieve the same end result of reducing the population by one?
I was deeply disappointed with the libraries at Stanford. It influenced my decision not to go to work there. That and the $50K salary they were offering.
Seriously, I don't care if someone guesses or bruteforces a password to some news site, or anything where I've used a totally random pseudonym in the first place. I will do things like use weak passwords, re-use them, etc. Because I don't care. I mean, I *really* don't care. Please hack these. Who cares? Not me.
Web sites and applications where I *do* care, get particularly long, entropy-rich randomly generated passwords. These passwords do get stored locally, on a well-encrypted medium that I would be most happy to surrender at the first hint of torture. But these aren't going to be casually guessed, and if you're trying to brute force one of these accounts, you're much better off attacking the next one over. (I take the same strategy with auto and home security as well -- all I really have to do is make YOUR car look more attractive to thieves.)
Well, I doubt they are "against their will" in any legally meaningful sense. You do sign a contract when you make the purchase, and it's normally part of a deed restriction. What I wish more people would try to do would be to get to the table and then get to a point in the negotiation (all contracts ready to sign, money is in the escrow account, the transaction is for cash, etc.), where the one sticking point is that the selling party needs to strike this HoA covenant. I would go as far as to say that if they _can't_ do that, the property isn't actually theirs to sell. I wonder if anyone has ever walked away from an otherwise closed real estate deal on the basis of not being exempted from an HoA.