What Do I Do About My Ex-Employer Stealing My Free Code? 545
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?"
Just fork it (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:SOL (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :)
Re:Lawyer (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Give up - inappropriate (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Talk to Tom Hudson (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Lawyer (Score:5, Interesting)
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).