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Ask HN: Worth the risk to accept volunteer contributions to for profit business?

5 points by phaedrus ↗ HN
My partner and I just incorporated (yesterday!) our startup game studio. We each own 50%, no investors 100% bootstrapped. My partner knows someone who wants to contribute code (for free) for the learning experience.

My initial reaction is that accepting this is potentially a huge risk. It's an asymmetric risk.

On the other hand there is far too much work ahead of us for two people. If I say "no, no, no" every time my partner comes to me with people who want to help we would never hire any employees.

Is there a way to accept volunteer contributions to a for profit company that is fair to the volunteer while managing acceptable risk for us? I'm considering both the legal implications, and the moral implications. I think in this instance the contributor just genuinely want simple work experience because he is a CS student and we are in an area of the US where there are no existing game programming companies AFAIK. Though I don't think this instance is the case, I could also envision someone offering to do volunteer work with the hope that they'll join the team. The problem is what if someone contributes something but for some reason we don't want to hire them. We aren't trying to turn this into a large company or get a big payout at the end, we just want to make enough to support the founders doing something we love.

We're what I would call an "open source friendly" company; our game itself isn't open source but we use open source and plan to open source some portions of our libraries and some tools in return. So what I suggested to my partner was that perhaps we could open source the portion of the game engine that the volunteer works on; that way it'd be more fair since they'd be free to fork the project and reuse their own work if they disagree with us, and might be less risk for us because it would be separate from our game code and we could make our own fork if we disagree with them. (Am I right that it would be less legal risk?)

I'm sure many of you have been in similar situations. What are your thoughts?

3 comments

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dryicerx
Have the volunteer release his work/part under MIT license, then you can use it for whatever you want (open source or within closed source proprietary stuff). Another option is simply paying him a small sum, just so it would have been compensated work.
phaedrus
I have heard of at least one story where an employee-programmer was compensated for his work and later claimed copyright-ownership over the code he was hired to write, and was successful in getting some kind of court decision or settlement, so I don't think the mere existence of compensation alone is sufficient to prove transfer of ownership. But the MIT license part you suggested is reasonable.
xasper8
I worked at a for profit company as an unpaid intern in college, just for experience. The experience/letter of recommendation was my compensation - legally or morally would there be a difference in your case?