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.
Thanks for the tip. I ended up consulting a friend of mine (an attorney specialising in company law and ipr) yesterday and it turns out what I'm doing is perfectly legal and foolproof. So all's well.
So I guess it works in my favor because I own the git repo.
There's always something, isn't it. I can change my git timestamps and the employer can change its server log timestamps if there's maleficence at either side. That's a completely different territory then.
FWIW, I just found out that shower clauses are unenforceable (at most places) if it did not occur in paid time notwithstanding the fact whether you signed such a contract or not. There has to be a payment in lieu of your services otherwise such terms are deemed to be void.
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.
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)
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.
hehe. Yeah that is indeed a salient clause there. Especially since I'm highly underpaid. Both me and my employer knows that finding my replacement is going to be tricky. Sucks money wise but gives me a great work life balance. :-D
Your charged your phone in your office? There, Gotcha! You used "company resources".
Believe it or not, lawyers will put arguments like these and the judge will accept those as valid reasons.
btw, I have a similar setup (I don't work on it during office time inside the office, though) with a minor difference. I vnc/ssh to my aws setup rather than my home. This way my laptop lives longer and wife doesn't bicker about electricity bills.
Actually that's why I release the code on Apache/MIT combo. This way, I get to keep my code open source without forcing my company to release the modified code. Also there are no patent related issues as Apache handles that beautifully. This way, both of us get to be happy. All I want is that the original piece of my code is
1) mine for ever. Attribution wise.
2) open source for ever
3) every contributor to the code is always attributed for their work.
4) my company can make proprietary (the reason why I avoid LGPL) profits and take royalty on its modified part but my original piece must remain in the wild for me or anybody to be used freely.
yeah... somebody needs to always make sure not to be the bigger fool...
1) Git commits have timestamps.
2) Proving I did on company laptop is their onus. Innocent until proven guilty. ;-P
3) I do that. Along with randomisation of sample data. but yeah, you make a very important point in general. 99% of people get screwed on such things.
4) If I do something using company laptop, it is bound to be logged somewhere. All my git visits are also logged and archived for 10 years as per law. So proving I did it using company laptop is easy and it is them who have to prove it. And a foolish lawyer is a dream come true because then I can keep dismissing his every argument as wasting the learned court's time.
But yes, keeping things straight forward is always a better idea.
This thing has been bugging me the first time signed an employment contract years ago.
So from what I understand is that everything I do on conpany property (that includes coding in a pub but on the company laptop) belongs to the company.
So what I do is to first code it (any new idea that I'm working on) at home on my personal setup (including cloud an all). Then I release everything on a Apache V2 + MIT combo with CC BY SA 4 (for pics, vids etc) that I think covers everything.
Then I host it under a github organisation (I am the admin of the org but the code is not hosted directly in my profile). Then I go back to the office next morning and ask one of the junior team members to fork it.
In my head, I'm thinking that yeah well, I wrote something in my personal capacity somewhere and then somebody from the company forked it, so that's not my problem.
So far so good... And the department is too much dependent on me so avoids any confrontation anyway. But I have always wondered, if this is fool proof? Can somebody find any loopholes in this approach and make it better...