This is simply illegal. I am surprised at how the HN community is acquiescing to this throwback claim and isn't challenging it with righteous indignation. It crosses numerous legal, ethical and historic boundaries and should deeply taint the IBM brand for anyone reading it.
This seems very much the case sadly ... a friend of mine is working as a software engineer at IBM (in Europe) and they indeed are not allowed to use their personal accounts to make open source contributions in their spare time. They would have to ask IBM legal to sign off on everything. Sad life.
That was also the case for CSIRO, Australia's largest government scientific organisation, when I worked there years ago. We had a lot of open source collaboration products but they were tightly managed and approved.
Legal were so backlogged that approval for anything other than a strategic project was impossible.
I was not allowed to submit work to unapproved projects, other than my personal stuff I'd listed as my own IP on being hired.
It's usually about IP protection ahead of brand protection.
It depends on what jurisdiction you're in, but for example in California:
2870.
(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
I don't think it's meant literally. Only that you "represent" IBM all the time, even if not technically working for them. This is a fairly common stance AIUI.
It's a common stance, just unpopular with workers.
Very popular with employers, of course: You get to avoid the minor risk of them embarrassing you; you reduce their job market value by preventing them from having a portfolio or any public profile; you remove non-work distractions from their free time; and you get to vacuum up any IP they generate outside of work hours.
So naturally, employers want to normalise the idea.
You're being employed by IBM for 100% of the time, but you're working 40h of your time.
When it's weekend, then you aren't stopping being employed by your company, aren't you?
edit.
is this whole thread some peak of HN? when you're leaving your Google office, then you aren't magically stopping being Googler.
Same way with universities - if you attend e.g Harvard and then do a lot of shit even outside the school, then you should expect to be kicked or punished at best.
I think unfortunately you are mistaken. Lots of large US companies do this and it's contractual - you sign a paper that they own any IP you create even on your own time.
2870 (a) Any provision in an employment agreement stating that an employee should assign any of his rights in an invention to his employer shall not apply to an invention which the employee develops totally on his time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for the inventions which:
2871 Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or anticipated research or development of the employer
2872 Result from any work done by the employee for the employer.
"
In the state of California clauses assigning _all_ IP to the employer in an employment contract are not legal, and hence unenforceable.
All the ones I have signed only claim IP directly related to the company's business model.
Obviously that gets trickier if the company is like, Microsoft which at least has tried to make every kind of software imaginable. But most companies do pretty much one thing, and I am free to develop whatever else besides that on my own time. It seems reasonable.
The statement goes far beyond any contractual obligation. But I agree, it is a mistake to sign away all intellectual property rights and such a contract is legally binding. It isn't clear that such a contract exists here.
I always search for these paragraphs and mark them out, and let them know that I marked out the sections. They're free to redraft them or leave the marked up version. Otherwise it's time to hit the road.
If you are salaried, your 40 hours a week is just the minimum. Some employers respect the 40 hours, some expect you to work well past that number until the job is done.
That does not mean they can order you around like a slave. What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot eat at a particular restaurant, or eat pasta? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot sleep on a spring mattress? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot walk a dog on the weekend? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he can invest in a mutual fund? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot help his neighbor in his garden? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot pee while standing? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot get a divorce? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot help his dad with a computer problem? What if IBM tells him that as an IBM employee he cannot answer a stack overflow query?
I don't think the JoelOnSoftware article is that informative for this situation.
The IBM employee is being forced to represent IBM under his official email alias regardless of whether the IBM employee acknowledges IBM owns his work product around the clock.
Lijun Pan was listed in MAINTAINERS for IBM's VNIC driver with their IBM email up until 3 days ago, when they changed their email to their personal address and changed themselves from M ("Mail") to R ("Reviewer")[0].
Then, today, they received these instructions: "Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change."
It looks to me like there's been a change in the organization--either in this employee's assignment or in their policies surrounding contributing to their VNIC driver--that this employee was trying to bypass by identifying their commits as now being part of a personal hobby.
Counterpoint: this employee wasn't trying to "bypass" anything. The change from maintainer to reviewer only means they wanted to be in copy of patches/emails in order to provide feedback; providing reviewer time is basic etiquette in the linux kernel.
You're missing that they added their personnal email in the maintainer file by using their ibm email, in the commit where they were supposed to remove themselves.
Employees giving themselves personnal privileges using company resources, while being specifically asked to remove themselves from those that they had has employee, is vastly different context than "he was there as a hobby and ibm cracked down on him".
IBM allows open source work. But there are rules, particularly about transparency. Just consider the sco lawsuit that won't die, and you may get an inkling why. This person appears to be in the open source / linux part of ibm. IBMers all must accept open source contribution guidelines. It sounds like this person simply didn't fully follow. Managers response may have been heavy handed but again none of us here knows details unless somebody provides them.
I notice there's four other ibm addresses so there is a story there.
Disclaimer and disclosure - IBMer who contributed openly and with management awareness and never got this kind of stern instruction :-/
IBMer her also. I don't know the VNIC initiative but it might be a question of contract, where all IBMers working on that specific open source project need to clearly disclose (being an IBMer) and the email is the way to do it (IBM might measure the participation).
Might also be a question of tracking a "conflict of interest", where the professional in question might work on a similar proprietary product inside the company.
IBM certainly allows you to do your side gigs, but you need to be transparent with the company about what it is and that there is no conflict with your work.
Thanks for this. I felt myself reaching for the pitchfork. There are too many unknowns here. No one really wins in situations like these.
Unless proprietary tech is used, I think I would advocate for laws protecting people from being restricted working on projects that provides such a public good... but that is another argument entirely.
I'm actually a happy IBMer (unpopular opinion here I'm sure:), and happen to have a great long term relationship with my management chain, so I inform them of everything, both in a friendly and official capacity. Makes everything easy. I even told my boss when I had a completely unrelated side business (music at parties) etc.
When it comes to open source contributions, both business conduct guidelines and open source mandatory yearly certs are unambiguous about transparency and approval of open source contributions. So it's pretty mandatory I think to inform, and limited if any impetus not to open open about it.
Working for a big corporation is a bit cyberpunky/Snowcrashy in that way I suppose.
Sounds like a simple misunderstanding to me. Employee thought they were doing something acceptable to formally disengage from the project and just wanted to monitor traffic. IBM interpreted it as an attempted end-run-around. Not surprised, virtualization stuff is still in demand, sounds like typical IBM-internal perl-clutching going on.
I used to work in Global Services for a few years starting in 1999 when I was fresh out of school (on-site "Customer Engineer" for hardware break/fix). I don't think all divisions have the same requirements, but we had to sign documents explaining IBM owned everything we created on our free time at hire-in. I was young but I had built enough software and hardware projects by then that I realized this was a bad deal. Linux was just starting to get enterprise recognition and open source in general was starting to really take off. My manager and others all laughed when I pushed back on signing this, "what does this kid thing he's going to invent on his own time?".
I filled out the paperwork noting the exceptions of things I had already built. However because my location was fairly distant from any central IBM office I rarely saw my manager (he worked about 80 miles away from my location). Once I realized this paperwork never got filed I just let it drop. When I left the company I noticed they had this same paper signing over all my IP rights to IBM at my exit interview. I was still young and dumb so I signed it rather than telling them to get bent. However I had been so busy those years that I hadn't done much of anything in my free time. But yea this sucks and it's a thing. Yet another reason why anonymity is still needed in the modern world.
One way I interpret this, is code of conduct. I worked for a bank for a long time. You were always expected to abide by the code of conduct outside of standard hours. Generally the bank's code basically said be a good member of society. So, in the IBM context it's possible there is an agreement or code where it says they can work on software projects, but they need to identify themselves as IBM employees at all times. I'm just speculating here.
Also possible that they literally may have an agreement forbidding them from participating in software projects, or that IBM has the rights to all IP that they might think up on their own time while on salary.
I remember one agreement many years ago when I worked in IT, that said the company had the rights to whatever I thought up while working for them and it didn't specify that it had to be directly related to their area of business. So if I wrote a sequel to Gone with the Wind, they would have had the rights to it.
(Context - I've worked for IBM on two non-consecutive occasions, do not currently, speak only for myself etc)
It may also vary by geography.
Between 2005-2012ish, IBM UK and IBM Australia didn't claim ownership of IP created on your own time, and I wouldn't have wanted to sign up if they had, but they did require you to consult them and seek permission before becoming heavily involved in FOSS and contributing to public OSS projects. This was for several reasons, IIRC -
- To make sure you weren't competing with their business
- To make sure you weren't leaking IBM IP
- To make sure you weren't bringing IP into IBM that might cause issues (think SCO)
This all seems pretty reasonable. OTOH the one time I did want to make a contribution to the linux kernel (board support for an ARM NAS), IBM delayed giving me any answer at all until the moment had passed and the project was no longer interesting. I very quietly helped a couple of other people get their boxes running too, as I hadn't been explicitly forbidden from sharing the work, but I didn't feel confident trying to submit it to the maintainers in case it got picked up by my employer and they kicked up a fuss.
> So if I wrote a sequel to Gone with the Wind, they would have had the rights to it.
Edit - I should have asked for clarification, do you mean when you are on the clock or off the clock? I interpreted your comment as the latter and wrote my comment below with that in mind.
Is the practice of companies owning the rights to software you make on your own time commonplace?!?! I am a student and I really want to go into the field of computer science, however whenever I read stuff like this it is incredibly disheartening.
Also the semi-recent Nginx ownership rights issue comes to mind.
Honestly, depends on the company and the state you're working in. It's all anecdotal, so take the following with a grain of salt.
I've worked for startups in Washington and California. In Washington, there was an invention clause in my contracts, but in practice it was a) practically unenforceable and b) as long as you divorced your work identity from your personal identity, nobody cared. This meant not having a way of tracing an anonymous handle or email to you working for the company. In California, I've never seen an invention clause in my contracts, but they were also much better at divorcing your work and personal identity systematically (forcing you to use a github account specific to the company, not mentioning this handle on your personal account, etc.).
In any case, keeping your work and personal work completely separate (no competition between work and individual ideas, no shared hardware) is a good idea and won't raise as many eyebrows. Some companies will be more aggressive about owning what you do, so if it matters to you then ask about the clause before signing the contract.
> whenever I read stuff like this it is incredibly disheartening
Its not something to worry about most of the time. At least here in Australia the below situation would be very unenforceable
> if I wrote a sequel to Gone with the Wind, they would have had the rights to it.
A company buys your time and the IP in and around the industry your job is in. Like you can't steal customers, you can't steal IP. If you're paid to come up with a new product/idea you can't just resign and become a competitor you'll get sued for that.
But if your a programmer and write a sequel to Gone with the Wind even if your contract states that the company owns your ideas it won't stand up in a court if the company tries to take ownership. So long as you didn't use company hardware or information which can only be gotten at that company.
> Is the practice of companies owning the rights to software you make on your own time commonplace?!?! I am a student and I really want to go into the field of computer science, however whenever I read stuff like this it is incredibly disheartening.
my buddy who works at Amazon can't do game jams or even mess around with any personal game or web development at all without getting HR to explicitly sign off on it.
And it is very possible that the university you are currently at owns some rights to your current work (it's a complex legal topic, but a lot of schools do have a copyright transfer in their rules).
Don't worry, in most civilized countries such clauses are illegal. In the U.S. some states allow them but many companies either don't have them or don't enforce them.
Remember that in the software engineering industry, the (competent) engineer is the hot commodity. If your employer turns out a bad apple, just leave to a different one. That's what keeps the nonsense in check -- not regulations, but competition for the best employees. For employees this is a great situation to be in. Unlike in other industries.
Off the clock. I can't speak for commonplace, this specific agreement was from 1999 and was probably not enforceable then (but who knows) as I believe no one can reasonably be expected to turn over original creations and impoverish themselves, if there is no connection to the company's area of business. Things vary depending on the year and the country.
You can negotiate your agreements if you see something objectionable in them. (Read them!)
I work for a company you've heard of, and that's their policy.
_However_, if I had a side project I wanted to work on, I can get clearance to pursue it, so long as it doesn't compete with any of the company's ventures. It's a straightforward process, not a big deal at all.
They're just trying to get ahead of/avoid potential ambiguous IP ownership situations.
Even outside the US it is not that unusual for employers to have rights under certain circumstances, and those circumstances quite often center on whether what you do outside of hours strays close enough to what you do at work.
For someone to continue to work on the very same piece of software that they have worked on on the clock and expect their employer to accept they have no rights to it would seem dicey in a lot of jurisdictions without having some explicit agreement in place.
> So, in the IBM context it's possible there is an agreement or code where it says they can work on software projects, but they need to identify themselves as IBM employees at all times.
I thought that too, but the last sentence:
> I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change.
... sounds to me like Pan isn't allowed to work on it in his spare time even using his IBM email address. He made the email-removal change using his IBM email address, so I don't think it can be interpreted as a one-time exception to use his personal email address to do that removal. It sounds like a one-time exception to submit any kind of change at all.
This is literally why I quit my last job from Quest / One Identity after a merge. Same fucked up policy that I don't "own" my free time. I don't understand how can people accept this kind of policy.
Yep, agreed. But when you're first starting out you have to make some sacrifices and employers know this.
In IBM's case, they've been burned pretty bad in the past. Gene Amdahl was one of the engineers that designed the IBM 360, the first mainframe. After having a rough go inside IBM's bureaucratic system he left to found the Amdahl Corporation that built hardware compatible mainframe computers. That REALLY pissed IBM off, mainframes are a huge money maker for them and sipping from their own drink was a declaration of war.
I'm not defending their behavior, but IBM really clutches it's pearls. I worked on iSeries hardware (AS/400) among other gear. Even inside IBM and taking IBM classes on the system it was next to impossible to get free-time on OS400 to learn on your own. I got to be friends with the 400 instructors and even then they wouldn't help me learn more than what I was allowed to know about the system. My speculation was they didn't want us field guys getting side work doing stuff for customers that IBM wanted to bill for. Just one of the many reasons I left.
There's a switching cost inherent to employment that some people simply can't or won't risk. The only way to give people total freedom to accept or not accept a policy like this is to make it so their fundamental needs are already met.
The ideal outcome here is the person was going to remove their personal email address. The author of that message could achieve it in a few ways:
- Speak to the person like a professional and explain the company policy and give a little context on why things are the way they are
- Take a combative, aggressive tone and demand it be changed
The first builds trust, the second breeds resentment and hurts company image if it leaks (I guess when people resent you they'll take micro aggressive actions to embarrass you by leaking it).
A company where people who take the 2nd path are in a position of power is a toxic workplace with many broken systems in place.
I'm interpreting this comment is saying we think this is a "leak" and that it unprofessional to show off internal politics with our bosses.
Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
> I'm interpreting this comment is saying we think this is a "leak" and that it unprofessional to show off internal politics with our bosses.
Yes, I think including an exchange with your manager in a commit message is a leak, and one way the employee was able to get back at their manager for the draconian response. I don't think it's unprofessional. It's well within their right to write whatever commit message they want to an open source project. No identifiable information was included.
> Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
No, my response is when you have people in charge who can't see the cost / benefit of actions and take the one that's emotionally charged (maybe because they were annoyed or had a rough day) but ultimately damaging over one that is more beneficial (to the employee, to the company, to the manager's career), you may be working in a dysfunctional company.
> At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
I don't have an opinion on this. You can be "combative" in a professional way. You challenge process changes with data. Asking questions is not combative, by the way.
Yep, definitely agree with this. Management is always testing out the waters, seeing how much they can push a worker to work. They want more units of productivity out of you for the price they're paying you. But we can fight back to some degree, simply by saying 'no' to things, but we gotta be careful. Saying no too often will land you in the no-promotion bucket when reviews come around, or can get you canned. But politics is politics, and we're all forced into playing it.
Although, when a group of workers decide to band together to fight back, that's a different story, and that's when things get interesting. :D
We have no evidence that the first thing wasn't attempted.
Furthermore, from the phrasing of the message (refuting the idea that one can contribute to one's employer's project as a hobby), we have some evidence that there was previous context, unknown to us.
The way I'm interpreting this, it's not _because_ they used a personal address, but rather that they weren't allowed to contribute to VNIC [for contractual reasons], and using a personal email address does not magically bypass that restriction.
(The current title is "IBM employee forced to stop kernel work for using personal email address", which is an interpretation likely missing context)
To quote the quote given in the commit:
"As an IBM employee, you are not allowed to use your gmail account to work in any way on VNIC. You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby". You are an IBM employee 100% of the time. Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change."
Your interpretation is not obvious to me at all. To me that reads that the person was using is private address to work on the kernel as a hobby and IBM objected because he is considered to 100% at IBM. My interpretation of this is of the typical corporate overreach were they claim everything you do is theirs.
To me the worst part is the `100% of the time` interpretation.. Seriously I thought my employment agreement mentioned only 40 hrs a week??.. Unless it has explicit clauses to mention to contributing to VNIC without IBM ID, this is just some one interpreting legal rule for their convenience or what they wanto make a stand of.
I had a job offer from an IBM company once. The offer negotiation part happened directly with IBM. The salary went to hell because I live in Canada, and although the position was fully remote, they took away the juicy US salary and offered me a sucky Canadian one. The main reason I work remote is to not get stuck with a Canadian salary. In addition they stated that everything I do at any time is owned by them. I had a side project, so I applied for an exemption. It went through legal for a couple weeks. It was denied.
I turned the job down. The whole process wasted tons of my time and theirs and could have been avoided if they had just been upfront about their policies instead of writing useless crap about how great their culture is in the job ad.
You and the person you responded to interpreted it exactly the same way, I think.
This IBM employee isn't allowed to contribute to VNIC. Why? I dunno. But the problem isn't if a personal address is used or not, but rather this specific IBM employee can't contribute to VNIC.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the fairness of that, but rather that the OP was saying "it wouldn't have been any better if they had used their IBM address."
To your last point... I doubt that's what's happening here. I don't think IBM wants ownership, but rather is protecting themselves from any sort of litigation or undermining an agreement.
All intellectual property I create is owned by my employer, per terms of employment. My employer doesn't care about my musical performances, since no one else would, either ;-) North Carolina is friendlier to employers than California in thus regard.
As I interpret it, it's not even that. The instruction is to remove his personal email from the MAINTAINERS file, not to halt work on the project. Now, maybe that was said offline, we certainly have no evidence. But the most obvious interpretation is that Lijun Pan was employed by IBM to work on the Linux kernel driver for this piece of IBM hardware, and IBM (unsurprisingly) wants all contributions credited to them and not to individuals. Most employers would have similar rules if you ask them. Certainly mine wouldn't want me using my personal address for stuff they paid me to do.
Is the way this was done maybe a bit hidebound, corporate and uncharitable? Yeah. It's IBM, duh. But absent other evidence it doesn't seem like this devleoper is being pulled off a project for using a personal email.
For a little additional context, a few days ago, Pan removed himself (using his IBM email address) from the maintainers list in the same file and added himself (using the gmail address) to the reviewers list. The linked commit removes Pan entirely.
There’s more going on here than is visible from the out-of-context quote in the commit message.
The fact that the entire entry was removed, as opposed to simply changing the address, combined with the tone of the message, makes me think otherwise. However, I'm basing this off the exact same information as you (presumably), so it's a bit of a moot point until someone wants to pitch in with more authority.
As I interpret it, he cannot make updates at all, even though he's using his personal email address.
The important bit might be: what state he is in. Then to a lesser extent, what kind of work he does for IBM and what kind of work he does on the kernel.
In the current employment environment where employers do assert rights over the output of employees, it's not that strange that the employer would instruct the employee to not muddy the context of the contributions.
This is reasonably separable from whether this is a good way to organize things as a society.
Any sort of administrative action or warning should not have to be interpreted. If that is the case, the warning should have been explicit that they are not allowed to contribute in any way because of said contracts. Instead, there's hand-wavy complaints about a "hobby" and very aggressive and cultish, "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time".
Remember that all we see is the bit of the email (presumably?) that the employee chose to post in the commit message. We don't know what other context there is. This feels like the last email in a long chain of emails, with a manager who's just done with excuses and trying to shut down any further argument in advance.
"Hey John, there are legal reasons preventing us from working on VNIC even in an unofficial capacity as IBM employees. I've attached a document outlining the company position as background. Let's chat more about this on Thursday in our 1:1."
I suspect from the tone of the email that the manager may have already tried that route and gotten pushback. It feels very much like a manager who is tired of the excuses and trying to be as unequivocal as possible so as to be 100% clear.
And that's assuming we even have an accurate statement, which is a big assumption. Aside from the missing context, we frankly don't know that any of this text was written by the manager.
Sounds like a reasonable interpretation. The phrasing of the message that the developer claims to have received is still concerning even keeping that in mind.
Yes, it's concerning, but it has to the feel of being the end of a long conversation. I'm picturing something like this:
Manager: You're not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm doing it on my spare time!
Manager: You're still not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm using my personal email.
Manager: * the email quoted *
---
It feels like someone who's hit the end of their rope with a long back-and-forth and is trying to close any remaining loopholes just to be done with the conversation.
Readit News
This is simply illegal. I am surprised at how the HN community is acquiescing to this throwback claim and isn't challenging it with righteous indignation. It crosses numerous legal, ethical and historic boundaries and should deeply taint the IBM brand for anyone reading it.
This seems very much the case sadly ... a friend of mine is working as a software engineer at IBM (in Europe) and they indeed are not allowed to use their personal accounts to make open source contributions in their spare time. They would have to ask IBM legal to sign off on everything. Sad life.
Legal were so backlogged that approval for anything other than a strategic project was impossible.
I was not allowed to submit work to unapproved projects, other than my personal stuff I'd listed as my own IP on being hired.
It's usually about IP protection ahead of brand protection.
2870. (a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
Dead Comment
Very popular with employers, of course: You get to avoid the minor risk of them embarrassing you; you reduce their job market value by preventing them from having a portfolio or any public profile; you remove non-work distractions from their free time; and you get to vacuum up any IP they generate outside of work hours.
So naturally, employers want to normalise the idea.
When it's weekend, then you aren't stopping being employed by your company, aren't you?
edit.
is this whole thread some peak of HN? when you're leaving your Google office, then you aren't magically stopping being Googler.
Same way with universities - if you attend e.g Harvard and then do a lot of shit even outside the school, then you should expect to be kicked or punished at best.
You're more or less representing them.
Then they should pay 168 hours / week and not 40
> You're more or less representing them.
No you don't
The hell means 'being Googler'? I'm not a Xer because I'm employed at X. Wake up.
"
2870 (a) Any provision in an employment agreement stating that an employee should assign any of his rights in an invention to his employer shall not apply to an invention which the employee develops totally on his time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for the inventions which:
2871 Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or anticipated research or development of the employer
2872 Result from any work done by the employee for the employer.
"
In the state of California clauses assigning _all_ IP to the employer in an employment contract are not legal, and hence unenforceable.
Obviously that gets trickier if the company is like, Microsoft which at least has tried to make every kind of software imaginable. But most companies do pretty much one thing, and I am free to develop whatever else besides that on my own time. It seems reasonable.
Before you rail on how wrong this is for a company to do, please read this article by Joel on the subject.
This is a super difficult topic for corporations that most don't realize and the article below walks through those dynamics.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
The IBM employee is being forced to represent IBM under his official email alias regardless of whether the IBM employee acknowledges IBM owns his work product around the clock.
Dead Comment
Lijun Pan was listed in MAINTAINERS for IBM's VNIC driver with their IBM email up until 3 days ago, when they changed their email to their personal address and changed themselves from M ("Mail") to R ("Reviewer")[0].
Then, today, they received these instructions: "Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change."
It looks to me like there's been a change in the organization--either in this employee's assignment or in their policies surrounding contributing to their VNIC driver--that this employee was trying to bypass by identifying their commits as now being part of a personal hobby.
[0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6b389c16378a03fe71f...
Employees giving themselves personnal privileges using company resources, while being specifically asked to remove themselves from those that they had has employee, is vastly different context than "he was there as a hobby and ibm cracked down on him".
IBM allows open source work. But there are rules, particularly about transparency. Just consider the sco lawsuit that won't die, and you may get an inkling why. This person appears to be in the open source / linux part of ibm. IBMers all must accept open source contribution guidelines. It sounds like this person simply didn't fully follow. Managers response may have been heavy handed but again none of us here knows details unless somebody provides them.
I notice there's four other ibm addresses so there is a story there.
Disclaimer and disclosure - IBMer who contributed openly and with management awareness and never got this kind of stern instruction :-/
Might also be a question of tracking a "conflict of interest", where the professional in question might work on a similar proprietary product inside the company.
IBM certainly allows you to do your side gigs, but you need to be transparent with the company about what it is and that there is no conflict with your work.
Unless proprietary tech is used, I think I would advocate for laws protecting people from being restricted working on projects that provides such a public good... but that is another argument entirely.
When it comes to open source contributions, both business conduct guidelines and open source mandatory yearly certs are unambiguous about transparency and approval of open source contributions. So it's pretty mandatory I think to inform, and limited if any impetus not to open open about it.
Working for a big corporation is a bit cyberpunky/Snowcrashy in that way I suppose.
I used to work in Global Services for a few years starting in 1999 when I was fresh out of school (on-site "Customer Engineer" for hardware break/fix). I don't think all divisions have the same requirements, but we had to sign documents explaining IBM owned everything we created on our free time at hire-in. I was young but I had built enough software and hardware projects by then that I realized this was a bad deal. Linux was just starting to get enterprise recognition and open source in general was starting to really take off. My manager and others all laughed when I pushed back on signing this, "what does this kid thing he's going to invent on his own time?".
I filled out the paperwork noting the exceptions of things I had already built. However because my location was fairly distant from any central IBM office I rarely saw my manager (he worked about 80 miles away from my location). Once I realized this paperwork never got filed I just let it drop. When I left the company I noticed they had this same paper signing over all my IP rights to IBM at my exit interview. I was still young and dumb so I signed it rather than telling them to get bent. However I had been so busy those years that I hadn't done much of anything in my free time. But yea this sucks and it's a thing. Yet another reason why anonymity is still needed in the modern world.
Was that intentional? Because it's brilliant!
One way I interpret this, is code of conduct. I worked for a bank for a long time. You were always expected to abide by the code of conduct outside of standard hours. Generally the bank's code basically said be a good member of society. So, in the IBM context it's possible there is an agreement or code where it says they can work on software projects, but they need to identify themselves as IBM employees at all times. I'm just speculating here.
Also possible that they literally may have an agreement forbidding them from participating in software projects, or that IBM has the rights to all IP that they might think up on their own time while on salary.
I remember one agreement many years ago when I worked in IT, that said the company had the rights to whatever I thought up while working for them and it didn't specify that it had to be directly related to their area of business. So if I wrote a sequel to Gone with the Wind, they would have had the rights to it.
It may also vary by geography.
Between 2005-2012ish, IBM UK and IBM Australia didn't claim ownership of IP created on your own time, and I wouldn't have wanted to sign up if they had, but they did require you to consult them and seek permission before becoming heavily involved in FOSS and contributing to public OSS projects. This was for several reasons, IIRC -
This all seems pretty reasonable. OTOH the one time I did want to make a contribution to the linux kernel (board support for an ARM NAS), IBM delayed giving me any answer at all until the moment had passed and the project was no longer interesting. I very quietly helped a couple of other people get their boxes running too, as I hadn't been explicitly forbidden from sharing the work, but I didn't feel confident trying to submit it to the maintainers in case it got picked up by my employer and they kicked up a fuss.Edit - I should have asked for clarification, do you mean when you are on the clock or off the clock? I interpreted your comment as the latter and wrote my comment below with that in mind.
Is the practice of companies owning the rights to software you make on your own time commonplace?!?! I am a student and I really want to go into the field of computer science, however whenever I read stuff like this it is incredibly disheartening.
Also the semi-recent Nginx ownership rights issue comes to mind.
I've worked for startups in Washington and California. In Washington, there was an invention clause in my contracts, but in practice it was a) practically unenforceable and b) as long as you divorced your work identity from your personal identity, nobody cared. This meant not having a way of tracing an anonymous handle or email to you working for the company. In California, I've never seen an invention clause in my contracts, but they were also much better at divorcing your work and personal identity systematically (forcing you to use a github account specific to the company, not mentioning this handle on your personal account, etc.).
In any case, keeping your work and personal work completely separate (no competition between work and individual ideas, no shared hardware) is a good idea and won't raise as many eyebrows. Some companies will be more aggressive about owning what you do, so if it matters to you then ask about the clause before signing the contract.
Its not something to worry about most of the time. At least here in Australia the below situation would be very unenforceable
> if I wrote a sequel to Gone with the Wind, they would have had the rights to it.
A company buys your time and the IP in and around the industry your job is in. Like you can't steal customers, you can't steal IP. If you're paid to come up with a new product/idea you can't just resign and become a competitor you'll get sued for that.
But if your a programmer and write a sequel to Gone with the Wind even if your contract states that the company owns your ideas it won't stand up in a court if the company tries to take ownership. So long as you didn't use company hardware or information which can only be gotten at that company.
my buddy who works at Amazon can't do game jams or even mess around with any personal game or web development at all without getting HR to explicitly sign off on it.
And it is very possible that the university you are currently at owns some rights to your current work (it's a complex legal topic, but a lot of schools do have a copyright transfer in their rules).
Remember that in the software engineering industry, the (competent) engineer is the hot commodity. If your employer turns out a bad apple, just leave to a different one. That's what keeps the nonsense in check -- not regulations, but competition for the best employees. For employees this is a great situation to be in. Unlike in other industries.
You can negotiate your agreements if you see something objectionable in them. (Read them!)
_However_, if I had a side project I wanted to work on, I can get clearance to pursue it, so long as it doesn't compete with any of the company's ventures. It's a straightforward process, not a big deal at all.
They're just trying to get ahead of/avoid potential ambiguous IP ownership situations.
Some of them will try it on, whether its enforceable or not is another matter. Always good to watch out for such clauses and object to them.
For someone to continue to work on the very same piece of software that they have worked on on the clock and expect their employer to accept they have no rights to it would seem dicey in a lot of jurisdictions without having some explicit agreement in place.
I thought that too, but the last sentence:
> I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change.
... sounds to me like Pan isn't allowed to work on it in his spare time even using his IBM email address. He made the email-removal change using his IBM email address, so I don't think it can be interpreted as a one-time exception to use his personal email address to do that removal. It sounds like a one-time exception to submit any kind of change at all.
In IBM's case, they've been burned pretty bad in the past. Gene Amdahl was one of the engineers that designed the IBM 360, the first mainframe. After having a rough go inside IBM's bureaucratic system he left to found the Amdahl Corporation that built hardware compatible mainframe computers. That REALLY pissed IBM off, mainframes are a huge money maker for them and sipping from their own drink was a declaration of war.
I'm not defending their behavior, but IBM really clutches it's pearls. I worked on iSeries hardware (AS/400) among other gear. Even inside IBM and taking IBM classes on the system it was next to impossible to get free-time on OS400 to learn on your own. I got to be friends with the 400 instructors and even then they wouldn't help me learn more than what I was allowed to know about the system. My speculation was they didn't want us field guys getting side work doing stuff for customers that IBM wanted to bill for. Just one of the many reasons I left.
- Speak to the person like a professional and explain the company policy and give a little context on why things are the way they are
- Take a combative, aggressive tone and demand it be changed
The first builds trust, the second breeds resentment and hurts company image if it leaks (I guess when people resent you they'll take micro aggressive actions to embarrass you by leaking it).
A company where people who take the 2nd path are in a position of power is a toxic workplace with many broken systems in place.
Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
Yes, I think including an exchange with your manager in a commit message is a leak, and one way the employee was able to get back at their manager for the draconian response. I don't think it's unprofessional. It's well within their right to write whatever commit message they want to an open source project. No identifiable information was included.
> Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
No, my response is when you have people in charge who can't see the cost / benefit of actions and take the one that's emotionally charged (maybe because they were annoyed or had a rough day) but ultimately damaging over one that is more beneficial (to the employee, to the company, to the manager's career), you may be working in a dysfunctional company.
> At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
I don't have an opinion on this. You can be "combative" in a professional way. You challenge process changes with data. Asking questions is not combative, by the way.
Although, when a group of workers decide to band together to fight back, that's a different story, and that's when things get interesting. :D
Furthermore, from the phrasing of the message (refuting the idea that one can contribute to one's employer's project as a hobby), we have some evidence that there was previous context, unknown to us.
We also have evidence that the employee in question was previously contributing on behalf of their employer, and for some reason, recently stopped: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net.g...
(The current title is "IBM employee forced to stop kernel work for using personal email address", which is an interpretation likely missing context)
Your interpretation is not obvious to me at all. To me that reads that the person was using is private address to work on the kernel as a hobby and IBM objected because he is considered to 100% at IBM. My interpretation of this is of the typical corporate overreach were they claim everything you do is theirs.
I turned the job down. The whole process wasted tons of my time and theirs and could have been avoided if they had just been upfront about their policies instead of writing useless crap about how great their culture is in the job ad.
This IBM employee isn't allowed to contribute to VNIC. Why? I dunno. But the problem isn't if a personal address is used or not, but rather this specific IBM employee can't contribute to VNIC.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the fairness of that, but rather that the OP was saying "it wouldn't have been any better if they had used their IBM address."
To your last point... I doubt that's what's happening here. I don't think IBM wants ownership, but rather is protecting themselves from any sort of litigation or undermining an agreement.
I hope their pay reflects that and is 3x the average.
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Is the way this was done maybe a bit hidebound, corporate and uncharitable? Yeah. It's IBM, duh. But absent other evidence it doesn't seem like this devleoper is being pulled off a project for using a personal email.
There’s more going on here than is visible from the out-of-context quote in the commit message.
The important bit might be: what state he is in. Then to a lesser extent, what kind of work he does for IBM and what kind of work he does on the kernel.
In the current employment environment where employers do assert rights over the output of employees, it's not that strange that the employer would instruct the employee to not muddy the context of the contributions.
This is reasonably separable from whether this is a good way to organize things as a society.
That would instantly make me start to execute on becoming an IBM employee 0% of my time.
All communication, inherently, must be intepreted. Administrative actions and warnings have no special exemption from this.
Sorry but that violates FLSA. You're only an employee when you're doing work. They don't own you.
"Hey John, there are legal reasons preventing us from working on VNIC even in an unofficial capacity as IBM employees. I've attached a document outlining the company position as background. Let's chat more about this on Thursday in our 1:1."
And that's assuming we even have an accurate statement, which is a big assumption. Aside from the missing context, we frankly don't know that any of this text was written by the manager.
Manager: You're not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm doing it on my spare time!
Manager: You're still not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm using my personal email.
Manager: * the email quoted *
---
It feels like someone who's hit the end of their rope with a long back-and-forth and is trying to close any remaining loopholes just to be done with the conversation.