It depends on the exact wording of your employment contract.
If it only covers work you did with company property, you're lucky.
As far as the law goes, in California (per Labor Code section 2870), employment agreements are allowed to assign the employer IP rights (including copyrights and patent rights) to inventions that satisfy any of the following:
- "[Use] the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information"
- "Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer"
- "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"
For my part, the employment contract I signed is maximalist: it basically paraphrases the above language and says that anything satisfying any of those conditions is assigned to my employer.
The third condition is really the kicker. If you want to use your code at work, then the code probably "relates to" your employer's "business" or "actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development". If your employment contract is as maximalist as mine (and there's a good chance it is), then that's enough to make it not yours, regardless of who (if anyone) forked it.
In my case, my employer is large enough that it's hard to imagine software that doesn't somehow relate to its business…
Ohh yes.. These contracts are always maximalist. That's why I never touch areas where my company can even remotely claim involvement. But these are extremely important points that must be always keep in mind by everyone who wants to contribute in open-source.
What you describe in your original comment is that you write code at night with the intent of it being used by your company the next morning. I can't see how that doesn't "relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business".
Oh it's not like I am trying to steal its IP from my company. I don't do that shit for everything I do. But only for the ideations that I know are great and think I am going to use later. In that regard, programming can be easily generalised. Let me give you some examples.
1) Let's us say my company wants me to create a full stack dashboard that helps you visualise the inventory. I can just create a corona dashboard and then adjust the db tables and models in the office whereas keeping my original idea still free.
2) I create a library to easily log my programs with proper gears suited to my needs.
3) I write a DB script that helps me do active passive backup easily.
4) I write an FPGA library with vLL but enforcing an encryption. I provide a use case for astronomy (whereas my company is for retail, let us say)
> I don't do that shit for everything I do. But only for the ideations that I know are great and think I am going to use later.
"I thought I might need it later" does not constitute a legal defense if your employer comes after you for IP theft.
IANAL, but I can't see what foundation your strategy rests on. That the code is generic does not change the fact that it was written by you to solve a problem that your employer had. This pretty unambiguously places it within the range of what your employer can claim as theirs, no matter how applicable it might be to other use cases.
It'd be one thing if you had code that you'd written a few months back that turned out to be useful solving today's problem. But what you're describing is that your employer asks you to do something and then you go and open-source part or all of the solution without consulting them.
If you are as indispensable as you say you are, the actually bulletproof approach to getting this code open sourced legally would be to use your influence to persuade your employer to officially open-source that code.
I’d like to differ. The foundation of my strategy is that I shouldn’t be obligated to run every code I write with my company legal. On the contrary, the simple reason that my code is generic absolves me from having to consult my company for anything I decide to write in my own time on my own property. I'm never going to say “I 'took' it because I thought I might use it later”. That clearly implies theft. My reasoning is “I wrote it first in the open source and then I thought it might be useful in the company that why I ‘reused’ it here.”
I don't think you got the premise. Like I said earlier, my motive is not to steal company IP but to keep my stuff my own so that I can use that whenever and wherever I want. That's what I tried to demonstrate with the examples above and I purposely provided multiple use cases. I am genuinely curious, if you can go through the example scenarios I cited and tell me which one of them the employer can claim as theirs, considering it is neither into healthcare not aerospace.
Nevertheless, I think we have our separate approaches and I think we can agree to disagree.
> Nevertheless, I think we have our separate approaches and I think we can agree to disagree.
That's not how the law works. You're either right that your solution works or you're wrong. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm warning you that you really need to talk to an attorney before assuming that this practice will keep you safe.
By that, I just meant that you're not addressing my points and just arguing aimlessly with cherry-picked snippets from my comments so I just wanted to kill this discussion in a civilised manner.
> That's not how the law works.
Oh, this is how the law works. Unlike programming, there's never a hard right or wrong.
> you really need to talk to an attorney
that's not what you said earlier. your idea is that I should run it through my company's legal for everything I do. Let me enlighten you what will happen next. They will simply summarily reject my request and put me on a watchlist. Consult your company legal only if you need to keep written evidence for your defense. For any advise, always consult an attorney from outside.
Anyway, after getting all feedback from other comments in this thread, I did decide to run this with a lawyer and after a good and pretty long discussion and going through all my stuff, he is pretty satisfied with my setup. In fact, some of the things I did are an overkill! Wouldn't say it would work for you too as the laws of the land from where you come from might be wildly different.
If it only covers work you did with company property, you're lucky.
As far as the law goes, in California (per Labor Code section 2870), employment agreements are allowed to assign the employer IP rights (including copyrights and patent rights) to inventions that satisfy any of the following:
- "[Use] the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information"
- "Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer"
- "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"
For my part, the employment contract I signed is maximalist: it basically paraphrases the above language and says that anything satisfying any of those conditions is assigned to my employer.
The third condition is really the kicker. If you want to use your code at work, then the code probably "relates to" your employer's "business" or "actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development". If your employment contract is as maximalist as mine (and there's a good chance it is), then that's enough to make it not yours, regardless of who (if anyone) forked it.
In my case, my employer is large enough that it's hard to imagine software that doesn't somehow relate to its business…