Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time (opens in new tab)

My employers have generally been fine giving me blanket permission to contribute to specific open source projects.

The framing matters: don't say "can I please do some charity work because it makes me feel good".

Say, "can I have your permission to get free rigorous review from experts in my field, and zero out all future maintenance costs for your company by contributing my fixes to the upstream open source project?"

Because that's really how it is. No employer of mine has ever said no to that. It is entirely in their interest for you to do this, you just have to help them see it.

> "and make sure you own the open source IP you ship. "

In all the juridictions I have worked in, the code I ship during my work hours is owned by my employer, not me. I simply just can't decide on my own to contribute during my work hours. I need a formal agreement to work on open source code, and every single time I asked for it it took so much time (months) to run through legal department that I simply gave up or another contributor had shipped a PR in the meantime so I just gave up asking.

This is a good idea, a great idea even, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to position it as "resistance".

Your job, likely, is to achieve some goal. You're the specialist who gets to decide how to achieve that goal. If open source software is part of that decision, then maintaining it is should also part of that decision. It's not radical, it's just doing your job by protecting the future stability and maintainability of things you rely on for that job.

While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc.

> In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is created by an employee as part of their job duties, the employer is considered the legal author or first owner of copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

That being said, I do think open source work (maintenance/development) should happen by salaried professionals instead of volunteers begging for donations. The big question is how to make that happen, how to get companies accept oss contribution as standard practice instead of something that needs separate individual negotiating.

I work for a reasonably large company. We have an Open Source policy that boils down to ask your manager first, don't do it in the name of the company and don't release anything confidential.

It's never been a problem, and I feel is perfectly reasonable in the grand scheme of things.

I don't have any problem contributing to 3rd party open source projects at work time for e.g. fixing a bug, but how do you deal with your OWN open source? Let's say you have a small library you made personally, then use it at work, then find a bug during work hours. If I contribute during those work hours, I think that'd be on the gray zone.

Has anyone negotiated this during an interview? How do you do it?

Developing typia (https://github.com/samchon/typia), and have used it in many companies. Although I never explicitly discussed open source when signing my employment contract, generally no one said anything about using or maintaining it. Even when I mentioned the need to add features or fix bugs while writing work logs or roadmaps, no manager really said anything.

Generally in every big corporation I worked any request to work on something outside of directly writing code to the company's codebase was answered by the direct manager with "Do it in your free time", even if the justification was provided. In a profit oriented environment only immediate value is considered worth pursuing. The attitude is pretty parasitic and dictated by the constant race for higher efficiency and metrics, which comes from the very top.

I've definitely forked to fix a problem and PR'd the result upstream to fix work problems before. IT's one of the nice things in terms of being able to use/access open source. It's also why git is pretty much a first class option for package.json and cargo.toml... Just so you can direct to the fork until a change is upstreamed.

with seniority, when you get to that point in the interview process where they ask you: "so you have any questions for us?", I just ask: "what is your position of using some of my time contributing to the OSS projects this company relies on?". Based on the answer, you decide if you want to stay.

Absolutely love this!

I’ve never had luck asking permission for open source stuff, either contributing or just publishing my own stuff (which is often work-related). No one told me no, but they never approved anything either. So at some point I stopped asking and I just do what needs to be done.

Whilst not viable in every business, I do this a lot in my research, scripts I create, custom software I make for the lab, I have been fortunate to be able to plop online. It is extremely niche software (power meter, and in the pipeline, aligning photonic chips) and often simply a linux/haiku version of existing windows based software but I like to at least give a little bit back considering all the taking the institute does.

Where I use to work, you got 4 hours per week to work on your on thing, but that ended when covid hit and the company started feeling some financial pain.

Every single fucking employee contract in the US mentions that the company has the right to any work done on company equipment and/or on company time.

This is such a bad idea, it's impressive.

noooo

Don’t give shit away for free if you expect something in return, even something altruistic like for the recipients to be nice to the gift and keep it in good shape.

I think it makes more sense for the commons to be built on mutuality and some kind of antibody against parasitic exploitation.

There is no “tragedy of the commons”. Private enterprise is the only tragedy.

Author here. I've maintained Homebrew since 2009. This manifesto is for the maintainers I know who have quietly built a sustainable OSS practice inside companies that directly or indirectly depend on their work. I'm also at the point in my career where I can say these things with fewer negative consequences than most maintainers can.

The "polite" channels (Open Source Pledge, GitHub Sponsors, Open Source Friday) ask companies nicely to contribute. I argue instead that maintainers inside those companies should just take the work time they need to maintain the open source those companies already benefit from.

Happy to take questions.

(I'm not a lawyer: please read your employment contract before acting on any of this!)

brought to you by the unemployed , or soon to be unemployed and sued.

This is an ethical disgrace and everyone involved should be ashamed.

This is so crazy. Companies benefit from OSS so they need to pay? Come on. Companies benefit from OSS because the core idea of most of these licenses is exactly this - everyone can benefit even without contributing back. Don’t like it? Think this is not fair? Don’t do OSS or pick a more restrictive license.

If a company pays for your work time not work products (many contracts work like this) they have the full right to expect that during this work time you do the work explicitly ordered by them. It’s not only the law - it’s common sense.

Surely OSS is a solved problem. AI generates everything automatically. You don’t need to look at the code, so there is nothing for humans to do but prompt.

If you can do 1000x surely most projects are now essentially “complete” and bug free.

I don’t get this contradiction. Something is wrong.