I suspect this is driven less by an overpossessive engineering management team than a legal team. I'd love to know more about what general counsel is afraid of since I know a lot of people under the same restriction and it meshes with the story Spoolsky tells[1] on side projects:
> Because they might try to take an investment, and the investor would say, “prove to me that you’re not going to get sued by some disgruntled ex-employee who claims to have invented the things that you’re selling.” The company wants to be able to pull out a list of all current and past employees, and show a contract from every single one of them assigning inventions to the company.
That sounds a lot more like “you are not allowed to use your personal email address for the same things you work on and call it a hobby”. Not a great conversation but it sounds like what happens when someone tries to rules-lawyer a large corporation which has tons of real lawyers and experience with, for example, patent and other IP lawsuits.
I have a feeling you would be shocked at the percentage of people in wealthy country's who would wake up at 1:30am every day for a meeting for 130k. Fucked up is very strong language.
I'd prefer a 1:30am meeting compared to a 9:30am meeting lol, I was just trying to appeal to what is most preferred, i.e. normal 9am to 6pm "working hours"
I was gearing my response in terms of what seems reasonable to expect... but yeah I'm sure everyone would try to stretch themselves to absorb more capital.
Working in backbone operations for a mid sized ISP, we sure don't have 1:30 meetings, but we do have scheduled 1:30 maintenance events (planned several weeks in advance), and people on the on-call list are expected to be available for middle of the night emergencies. Catastrophic fiber cuts and equipment failures like a roof failing and pouring water onto a DWDM chassis have the tendency to occur at fun times like 0330 in the morning on a holiday.
It is expected and known that if you do something like respond to a 0130 in the morning emergency and work the issue until 0430, then go to sleep, that you're going to sleep until whenever you wake up in the mid afternoon and probably not be useful for any other tasks that day.
I should point out that the salaried employees expected to respond to such things are compensated appropriately, and the general practice is to have a group of people so that each person is only on-call for some portion of each month.
The rank and file NOC employees and fiber splicers, field crews, field technicians are hourly employees and get overtime for incidents as described above. Depending on the state and labor laws they're also paid an hourly rate simply for being on-call, even if nothing happens, for the duration of their on-call rotation week(s).
Everything you said sounds reasonable. Tasks and hours are related to the specific work at hand, and mitigations are then given, as temporary allowances, to employees if extra work is demanded that are outside of "core hours"
I was just trying to highlight that I personally hate "core hours" and that if I'm on a marathon coding session from 9pm to 4am, and I'm intermittently unavailable from some arbitrary time (say 11:15am to 11:50am) and then I get a bunch of messages from bosses saying "where were you??" and I then explain that I was actually writing code, point to some commits and say "see? I did all this stuff" and they say "you are expected to work from 9am to 6pm" it feels like a slap in the face. I think good management should accept that people aren't robots (unless there is an outage, fair enough) and consider people's working preferences in their decisions.
Anyways, I'm sure you have some awesome war stories with deployments/maintenance events. You should share them sometime :D
There are definitely good reasons to, at minimum, have you _available_ from 9-6; say, for a meeting or to bring a coworker up to speed on what you're working on, but at the same time you don't necessarily need to be pinned to your desktop for the entire period of time to do that. Since remote working started I've taken advantage of that big time by just running errands during the work day but keeping my phone close by in case I get a ping on Slack.
No, they pay you a salary based on agreed working hours, usually a 40 hour working week. If that wasn't the case, they'd be firing you for going home at the end of the day.
No, they pay you to go home at the end of the day. That's part of your contract.
If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
If you even go to your secret other home you haven't told them about in another state (or worse, another country), and that creates tax withholding obligations in that state, they may not fire you, but they will be very displeased.
On call should be optional and paid accordingly. It should not be a part of the job, because not everyone is fit to do it (physically, mentally, family-wise, or otherwise).
Incentivize people to take on-call time and those who are fit will take it.
I don’t think this is right: people who can’t do it shouldn’t be expected to, but software developers should support their application in production so that, if it’s hard to manage, they have an incentive to fix that problems: throwing code over the wall for an operations team to deal with is a clear case of externalizing negatives.
To some extent a good faith effort is in order, but someone who is perfectly capable of doing 99% of the job shouldn't be expected to respond to things at 3am unless they willingly do so for extra pay.
I for one am perfectly capable of advanced software engineering work but I am NOT capable of compromising my sleep without causing serious heart arrythmias. Some other person might have to deal with a baby. Some other person might sleep early and do meditation at that hour because it helps prevent panic attacks during the day. Everyone is different, and personal time and rest time should be respected. There is so much behind the curtain of off-work time that employers don't see, and don't need to see, they just need to respect that time.
In my experience this isn't a very good take, I've been woke up 50+ times in a 7 night span of on call, that fucking incentivized me to fix the issues. But that doesn't FUCK ALL to the product/sales people that actually direct where resources are spent. If the on call people ACTUALLY get to work on the on call issues, I think on call can work.
But in my experience, every single place I've worked, has had insane on call hours. And you were ALWAYS expected to do your normal work on top of the on call hours and you were NEVER given time to fix the issue that woke you up in the middle of the night.
Until the actually engineers/developers are in charge of their own schedules on call shifts will be fucking bullshit.
I think for some jobs it makes sense to have on-call as part of the job description, but it's heavily overused. If there isn't imminent danger I don't think it should be ever required to force someone to compromise rest.
If it's just a question of product uptime then you should have enough people and pay people extra to be on-call. And don't deploy things at 5pm on a Friday.
> No, they pay you to go home at the end of the day. That's part of your contract.
Does your contract actually say this explicitly? Mine doesn't and I'm not sure it'd even be enforceable if it did.
> If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Now, it is true that this isn't common in software development jobs, but employment contracts for software development jobs aren't magic -- they're pretty much the same as any other employment contract.
(It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
I am also floored that someone actually thinks that their job is something they're paid to do 24/7.
I think it's the inherent weirdness of what USA considers "salaried" job - it seems to me that you essentially don't have set hours, your pay isn't related to the hours you put in, and any overtime gets waived in programming by the overtime exempt rule.
If this sounds to you like shit sandwich, that's because it is one, even if some people manage to make it work with less hours than norm.
> Does your contract actually say this explicitly? Mine doesn't and I'm not sure it'd even be enforceable if it did.
moonlighting clauses are fairly standard and I'd be surprised if your contract doesn't include one.
> You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Yes, people violate their employment contracts.
> (It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
The enforceability of moonlight contracts may vary. For example working at a software company and moonlighting as a barista is less likely to be enforceable than working at a software company and moonlighting at another (or moonlighting as a freelance developer), at least in the US, the second is probably a violation.
Not that this matters in the US since you're usually at will anyway.
I am prohibited by my employment contract from working a second job without approval.
It doesn't say, of course, that I'm supposed to go home. I can go to the bar, the library, the bowling alley, whatever. But it does say that I can't hold a second paid job (and it does demand that I truthfully tell them where I live). I am very much being paid not to work a second job.
Maybe you aren't! But I am, this is fairly normal for salaried positions in America, it's almost certainly enforceable, and it's something I willingly signed and accepted when I took this job.
I am aware there are a large number of people working non-salaried jobs who work multiple jobs. This thread is specifically about salaried jobs.
More relevantly to the thread, my contract also says that any work I do which is related to my employer's actual business is owned by my employer, whether or not I do it on work time or at work. I paid actual lawyers to review that portion of the contract before I signed it, and they told me it is absolutely enforceable. In this case, the question is whether an IBM employee can hack on an IBM-authored, IBM-maintained driver for IBM computers, contributing to which used to be part of their job on the side. It would be absolutely defensible for IBM to say they own this work regardless of when it happens, and it would be frankly surprising if the employment contract did not say that.
I get your point, but it seems pedantic. They still pay you for 40 hours a week. You are typically able to start a profitable side project in your own time.
"No, they pay you a salary based on agreed working hours, usually a 40 hour working week. If that wasn't the case, they'd be firing you for going home at the end of the day."
Hmm, do they? It's not in my contract, and (unfortunately) the labour law in Ontario for my profession doesn't support it either. We are expected to be "deliverable based" I think, rather than effort/work based. IANAL etc, but my observation is that Hourly employees are compensated for their hours; but it's less straightforward for salaried workers.
I'm in IT, and IIRC IT is one of the professions where salaried FTEs are not entitled to overtime in Ontario, but all of the salaried FTE contracts I've ever signed since the mid 90s had a specified number (usually 40) of working hours.
This isn't true in my experience (USA). No salaried job I've worked at has contractually stated working hours. All mainstream tech jobs. People go home at reasonable times due to social norms, not because it's in a contract.
> Otherwise you’d be making under minimum wage if you were salaried and making less than $90k.
No, because if you have a $90k salary and job duties that qualify for wage and hour exemption under FLSA and any applicable state labor law at that salary, then, there is no minimum hourly wage.
That’s what it means to be exempt from wage and hour rules.
For FLSA, “computer related” work is exempt at a salary of just over $35k.
Compared to a lot of countries, American tech people do make that amount of money. A factor of three (24/8) is not unheard of for the same role when you compare American and European salaries.
In practice it means at most they should've called him on the phone and not leave an email trail. You do what your boss wants, or you're out of a job. Outside California and inside California.
I believe California employment law is pretty pro-employee. Mostly if you develop something in your spare time, without using company resources in any way, it is yours.
I think that's why there are lots of startups in california.
In other states, employers in some cases can own everything, up to and including ideas in your head.
I don't know an example state that is the other side of the coin, pro-employer, but maybe texas? (uneducated guess)
This provision is useless if you work for a large company, because it carves out an exception for anything that could be related to your employer’s business.
Non competes are illegal in California. But while you are employed by a company I believe that most contracts require that even outside of work the company owns your IP unless otherwise stated - that's why there's a bit in your contract where you can specify prior inventions and whatnot, I believe.
Every company I've worked for has had it this way.
> most contracts require that even outside of work the company owns your IP unless otherwise stated
Assuming the outside work was performed on the employee's own time/equipment and doesn't compete with the employer's business, such contracts would be unenforceable in California. See section 2870 of the California Labor Code: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
> Assuming the outside work was performed on the employee's own time/equipment and doesn't compete with the employer's business
The rule actually encompasses more than simple competition, but in any case work on OS components for an alternative (and therefore competing) OS for the employer’s hardware for which they also sell proprietary OS software does compete with the employer’s business, so... (The particular thing the employee was denied permission to work on seems to be VNIC for IBM Power)
> Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
> (1) 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 or ...
I am not a lawyer, but I think it would not be unreasonable to believe that work on the kernel would be related to IBM's business (like RedHat).
Its not just that it doesn't compete with the employer's business but if it is related to the employer's business.
Furthermore, while the own time/equipment is there, there is also trade secret information mentioned beyond the time and equipment constraint.
Here it's not just work on the kernel, but work on the kernel on a driver for IBM hardware that two other IBM employees maintain, and that the employee in question was -also- previously a contributor to during work hours.
Yep, that "employer's business" part is relevant here. The person in question is writing a kernel driver for an IBM hardware while being an IBM employee. IANAL but I'm pretty sure that means "Employer fully owns employee's work" even in California.
Oh yeah, true true. You'll want to avoid using any company time, equipment (including the network), code, etc. and that should cover you, i think, but only so long as your work doesn't "compete" with your employers iirc.
To not act contrary to the interests of your employer (unless, I suppose you are whistle-blowing on some illegal activity...) is a universally expected norm, no?
Like others have mentioned this definitely sounds like the last of a long chain of emails.
And it really has the tone of just because you do it on your own time, with your own personal email as a “hobby” doesn’t mean you can use it as a loophole to get around restrictions IBM employees might have.
So, for example, if IBM isn’t allowed to contribute to a specific project for legal or contractual reasons, an employee doing so “in their own time” would not be a defensible argument.
It still has ramifications for personal contributions on their own time. We are our own persons, with our own desires and choices not to be dictated by our employers. I work for a corporation that says they own every piece of executable code that comes out of my fingertips and I think it is utter bullshit.
If I want to fix a bug in an esoteric Scheme implementation OR a bug in a JDK or PHP I have to ask for permission even though it is on my own time. I already volunteer more time than I am paid to my employer, but I have to ask for permission for something they have literally no interest in.
One way around that is to never put your real name on stuff outside of/owned by your employer. Keep your work and personal life as separated as possible.
Trying to do an end-run around legal issues by using pseudonyms is something you should only do after careful consideration of what might happen if that pseudonym becomes known.
It's not unreasonable to review and modify the proposed contract that an employer offers.
As skilled employees who's services are in demand, you've got a good chance of them coming to the table on that.
I agree that these things tend to overreach (the more powerful party in a negotiation will always try to get as much as they can), but most employment agreements will only claim ownership over things that you do in your own time that are related to your company's line of business. And in states like California and I believe Washington, companies cannot legally try to claim more than that. It's still more than I'd like, but I also can't get too worked up about it.
This is an IBM-maintained driver for an IBM-owned architecture.
You are subject to IBM trade secret law 100% of the time. Just because you only get paid for 8 hours of work a day doesn't mean you can use your 9th hour to tell people all about trade secrets. You are, in fact, paid to adhere to the terms of your employment contract 24/7.
I happen to be an IBM employee. I don't WORK 24x7 (well, not most weeks... ;), but "an IBM employee" is a state flag permanently assigned to me until explicitly changed:). I don't even feel it's debatable from a strictly semantic point of view. (I am many other things as well, FWIW:)
Hopefully starting from point of agreement, if at 9pm I log on to hacker news and start singing praises to IBM or complaining about its work or musing on its share price or revealing insider information, it would be a relevant disclosable piece of information that "I'm an IBM employee", no?
Hopefully he gets to be an IBM employee 0% of the time and work somewhere else where his contributions to OSS would be appreciated. And IBM can continue to kick themselves at losing a contributor and wonder why they're just a consulting firm now.
This implies that handling it well is aligned with keeping ones job. I don't agree with that mindset myself. I'd say they handled it poorly. But, then, both of us are at least half wrong regardless of which one is right.
In the real world no one cares about the tiny battle you're setting yourself up for in order to prove yourself. You'd just lose your job, and have nothing to show up for it.
Did you just "literally Hitler"-ed this thread? Yes, you did. Honestly, bringing Hitler up makes a request like "stop using your personal email on this project" seem super innocent by comparison. Congrats you made the current dicks at IBM look good.
Sure, people beaten, imprisoned and murdered trying to improve working rights, eight hour work etc but let's trivialize all that to childish terminology (cringe) and argument (bad apple).
I'd be inclined to agree (my own workplace has some managers that are pretty rough but I wouldn't call it a shitty place to work), except if this manager is quoting "IBM policy", then it's probably not just the manager.
That isn't the issue... you can see two other maintainers listed that have IBM email addresses.... this seems to be about wanting the open source work associated with IBM, their employer, rather than their personal email. If they are paid to work on open source, it makes sense they would want it tied to an IBM email. I think the wording was saying "you are employed to work on this open source project, so all your work on this open source project should be tied to your IBM identity, no matter when that work is done. This seems normal for salaried employees... the general rule is that since you don't have set hours, you can't spend your off time "competing" against your employer.... normally that means I can't run a side business selling analytics products if my day job is working for an analytics company, but it makes sense that if your salaried job is this specific open source work that they would want all contributions to it made in the company name.
> this seems to be about wanting the open source work associated with IBM, their employer, rather than their personal email.
In this case, the employee had been part of the team maintaining it at IBM in an official capacity... and then IBM apparently decided they did not want him to work with that team anymore. In turn, he changed the maintainers file to point to his personal email address, and the managers involved were predictably not amused.
No, the manager obviously talking about "hobby" email and being 24h/day employee (slave) so this has nothing to do with the day work of the certain programmer.
I doubt it, it is common practice for us to use personal e-mail addresses for open source contributions (since many of us have pre-existing community involvement before working for Red Hat). And we remain culturally distinct from IBM.
As a side note, really often we get asked to measure our open-source contributions, or get measured by some sort of analysis of a project. It is always an under-estimate because of all the non-redhat.com accounts that we use.
Almost all decent software companies have some kind of allowance for personal contribution to free software. IBM can't possibly be paying enough to attract people from these other places.
Yeah the scale of contribution from folks at big tech companies who of all people probably could come up with all sorts of hypothetical possible conflicts... and yet they don't seem to happen.
Really hard to understand how IBM somehow has to have such rules, but everyone else has contributing employees with no problems...
If they said "as an IBM employee with access to NDA'd/company secret documents on this thing, we do not want you to work on this", I would understand it.
But they didn't, and if it's just like this - that's straight A-grade bullshit.
We don't know they didn't say that. We only have what appears to be an excerpt that is missing a ton of context.
At this point we can't rule out that the employee cut the most damning part of an email out of context, put it in the commit message, and submitted this post on HN themselves (it's posted by a throwaway, so it's likely someone intimately involved in the case, not someone who just stumbled across it).
That is certainly a possibility, but if the quoted text is quoted verbatim, the way it is worded doesn't really feel like there was much more context. But that's just a guess on my end, and I'm relying on the assumption it was quoted unmodified.
That said, fundamentally, the question is whether you trust in Lijun Pan to represent the situation without distorting it. Without evidence to the contrary my personal assumption is to start with a little "trust credit" and take it as it is — for now…
Let's focus on understanding and changing the policy rather than punishing individuals. Given IBM's large presence in the open source world, this is either a misunderstanding or a major policy problem.
Let's do both - changing the stupid policy, and making sure whoever is stupid enough to stay stupid things like this and not realize the policy is stupid and brings negative value to VNIC, RedHat and IBM shares needs to find a job better suited for his "unique" skills.
Well THAT is a reasonable response after full examination of situation and facts and background and context and people!
Thx God you don't "have enough contacts"!
... I think I'd rather have the other guy as manager than you - there's a CHANCE that guy is not short tempered trigger happy a hole (slim as it may be;)
>Well THAT is a reasonable response after full examination of situation and facts and background and context and people!
>
>Thx God you don't "have enough contacts"!
>
>... I think I'd rather have the other guy as manager than you - there's a CHANCE that guy is not short tempered trigger happy a hole (slim as it may be;)
Of the 4 comments you've posted with this account, two have been impeccable and two have been egregious.
We want the former and not the latter! If you read the guidelines, it will be easy to tell which are which.
Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. We ban accounts that do this. I'm not going to ban you in this case, but if you don't fix this by significantly changing how you post to HN, we're going to have to.
IBM allows open source work. But there are rules, particularly about transparency. Just consider the sco lawsuit that won't die, and you may get an inkling why. This person appears to be in the open source / linux part of ibm. IBMers all must accept open source contribution guidelines. It sounds like this person simply didn't fully follow. Managers response may have been heavy handed but again none of us here knows details unless somebody provides them.
I notice there's four other ibm addresses so there is a story there.
Disclaimer and disclosure - IBMer who contributed openly and with management awareness and never got this kind of stern instruction :-/
I'm actually a happy IBMer (unpopular opinion here I'm sure:), and happen to have a great long term relationship with my management chain, so I inform them of everything, both in a friendly and official capacity. Makes everything easy. I even told my boss when I had a completely unrelated side business (music at parties) etc.
When it comes to open source contributions, both business conduct guidelines and open source mandatory yearly certs are unambiguous about transparency and approval of open source contributions. So it's pretty mandatory I think to inform, and limited if any impetus not to open open about it.
Working for a big corporation is a bit cyberpunky/Snowcrashy in that way I suppose.
IBMer her also. I don't know the VNIC initiative but it might be a question of contract, where all IBMers working on that specific open source project need to clearly disclose (being an IBMer) and the email is the way to do it (IBM might measure the participation).
Might also be a question of tracking a "conflict of interest", where the professional in question might work on a similar proprietary product inside the company.
IBM certainly allows you to do your side gigs, but you need to be transparent with the company about what it is and that there is no conflict with your work.
Thanks for this. I felt myself reaching for the pitchfork. There are too many unknowns here. No one really wins in situations like these.
Unless proprietary tech is used, I think I would advocate for laws protecting people from being restricted working on projects that provides such a public good... but that is another argument entirely.
>You are not allowed to use your personal email account
as a "hobby"
That's such a wide ranging statement, I'm kinda surprised the person writing it didn't stop and think "Yeah that sounds horrible...I can't believe I just typed that..."
The sentence was probably written by a lawyer, which would explain why something that sounds ludicrous to you and I sounds normal to them. And this isn't a troll! Lawyers speak a different language than the rest of us, and play by a different set of rules that Normal People would never think of.
Lawyers don’t talk like contracts all the time. Nevertheless, it’s usually obvious when they write policy because you get stupid things like this that clearly follow the letter of the law without regards to how they would ge construed.
The sentence sounds like the kind of email that a manager sends without having legal review it... This reads like it makes an unnecessary, potentially damaging statement ("...100% of the time..."), which lawyers I work with would likely have objected to...
I imagine if I'd worked with legal on something like this as the manager, they'd have advised me to convey the reasoning in a verbal, non-recorded meeting, and then for confirmation just issue a terse command with limited leak damage potential: "As discussed, please remove yourself..."
The way I'm interpreting this, it's not _because_ they used a personal address, but rather that they weren't allowed to contribute to VNIC [for contractual reasons], and using a personal email address does not magically bypass that restriction.
(The current title is "IBM employee forced to stop kernel work for using personal email address", which is an interpretation likely missing context)
Sounds like a reasonable interpretation. The phrasing of the message that the developer claims to have received is still concerning even keeping that in mind.
Yes, it's concerning, but it has to the feel of being the end of a long conversation. I'm picturing something like this:
Manager: You're not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm doing it on my spare time!
Manager: You're still not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm using my personal email.
Manager: * the email quoted *
---
It feels like someone who's hit the end of their rope with a long back-and-forth and is trying to close any remaining loopholes just to be done with the conversation.
Any sort of administrative action or warning should not have to be interpreted. If that is the case, the warning should have been explicit that they are not allowed to contribute in any way because of said contracts. Instead, there's hand-wavy complaints about a "hobby" and very aggressive and cultish, "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time".
Remember that all we see is the bit of the email (presumably?) that the employee chose to post in the commit message. We don't know what other context there is. This feels like the last email in a long chain of emails, with a manager who's just done with excuses and trying to shut down any further argument in advance.
Thank you thank you for posting this, comments like this are a reason I love HN and despise places like Twitter, where the name of the game often just seems to be to take stuff out of context in the hopes of getting a juicy, negative soundbite.
This manager could be an asshole, or he could just be exasperated after previous communication with the employee. Point is, we just don't know, and it's dangerous to draw conclusions based on the single email that the aggrieved individual chose to post.
> he could just be exasperated after previous communication with the employee
Then they are a very poor manager. That kind of tone and language should never be used. If it has gotten to that point, then the issue should be escalated to HR. But it doesn't sound at all like they're exasperated. It sounds like they're a bully.
Sounds like the type of email a manager who's stuck as the messenger for legal and/or HR and knows that this type of message has to be by-the-book in case it ever ends up as part of a legal proceeding. Unfortunately you can be the best manager in the world, but in that situation you still end up writing roughly the same email as someone who's barely competent.
> take stuff out of context in the hopes of getting a juicy, negative soundbite
Pretty much anyone who goes through someone’s posting history to find something then post it out of context to make someone look bad is someone who is not acting in good faith. Usually, the motive is to be a bully.
I would direct message you, but since you have decided to be completely anonymous with no contact information in your profile, I have to make this public.
It’s not removing context. It’s conversation drift, which frequently happens in online conversations. The post I was replying to mentioned Twitter, and it’s well known that some Twitter users will go though someone’s old blog or what not to find “a juicy, negative soundbite”. There’s even an expression for it: “offense archaeology”.
Please do not make bad faith accusations without looking at the full context of the conversation, which includes the post I was replying to. I don’t know what your intentions were making that reply, but it comes off to me as rude.
I didn't say you were operating in bad faith, I said you were removing context. And I stand by that.
> It’s conversation drift
You were quoting something that was being directly applied to the article. If you were only talking about twitter it's on you to make that clear. To me, your post very much reads as talking about both.
> I have to make this public.
Good. Someone clarifying what they meant should be public.
I think it’s just poorly phrased and what they’re trying to say is that their status as “IBM employee” is a boolean value. You either are an IBM employee (and presumably have some additional contractual requirements) or you aren’t.
No, I think this was pretty standard company-speak for "you're salaried so we own all your creative output, regardless of when or where you create it". Most employment contracts in the bay area (at least) have language to this effect, regardless of whether or not it's enforceable. Even if it isn't, an employer can still make your life miserable over it, and there's not much you can do about it aside from quit.
Clauses like that aren’t allowed in California. California law says that anything I do in my own time, on my own equipment, and not related to my company’s product is something my employer is not allowed to own.
I make this crystal clear whenever signing an “inventions” clause, and I avoid companies which make, say, DNS servers, for exactly that reason.
The sentence in question is misinterpreted. I read it like this: our contract applies all the time, not only when you're directly working for the company. We don't know what the contract exactly says. Likely there's an agreement not to work on IBM-related products in spare time.
Why only CA? Shouldn't it be that "the law" overrides illegal contracts - basically a tautology? Otherwise, what's stopping anyone from writing illegal contracts and forcing the other party to abide by them?
In the current employment environment where employers do assert rights over the output of employees, it's not that strange that the employer would instruct the employee to not muddy the context of the contributions.
This is reasonably separable from whether this is a good way to organize things as a society.
As I interpret it, it's not even that. The instruction is to remove his personal email from the MAINTAINERS file, not to halt work on the project. Now, maybe that was said offline, we certainly have no evidence. But the most obvious interpretation is that Lijun Pan was employed by IBM to work on the Linux kernel driver for this piece of IBM hardware, and IBM (unsurprisingly) wants all contributions credited to them and not to individuals. Most employers would have similar rules if you ask them. Certainly mine wouldn't want me using my personal address for stuff they paid me to do.
Is the way this was done maybe a bit hidebound, corporate and uncharitable? Yeah. It's IBM, duh. But absent other evidence it doesn't seem like this devleoper is being pulled off a project for using a personal email.
The fact that the entire entry was removed, as opposed to simply changing the address, combined with the tone of the message, makes me think otherwise. However, I'm basing this off the exact same information as you (presumably), so it's a bit of a moot point until someone wants to pitch in with more authority.
As I interpret it, he cannot make updates at all, even though he's using his personal email address.
The important bit might be: what state he is in. Then to a lesser extent, what kind of work he does for IBM and what kind of work he does on the kernel.
For a little additional context, a few days ago, Pan removed himself (using his IBM email address) from the maintainers list in the same file and added himself (using the gmail address) to the reviewers list. The linked commit removes Pan entirely.
There’s more going on here than is visible from the out-of-context quote in the commit message.
It would be a little nonsensical for the community to say that IBM does not control the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver," which is located in the drivers/net/ethernet/ibm directory, and which according to this very same MAINTAINERS file is maintained by three other IBM employees.
If they want to control it they can create their own repo and distribute it on their website. If it's going in the Linux kernel tree it should not be subject to single-handed decisions by a corporation.
This person can also quit IBM, therefore being subject to no contractual obligation, and then change the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver" entirely free of constraint as long as their code pass review. IBM has no control over the code, only the people it pays to change it.
That's a fair point about clean room implementation. However, I can see IBM shooting themselves in the foot suing a kernel developer over an email address change, if said developer quits beforehand.
Such an action would only decrease developer goodwill towards IBM. Needless to say, IBM is already not one of the "cool" companies to work for.
That's not quite right. If IBM is listed as maintainers for this driver, then any patches would necessarily go through them to end up in the mainline tree. And they could decide to reject patches from the person in question.
Although if this happened and legitimate code was rejected by IBM, what could happen is a community backlash against IBM as a maintainer and the code could enter that way.
> This person can also quit IBM, therefore being subject to no contractual obligation, and then change the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver" entirely free
I'd assume the person has received confidential information about the IBM technology in question during his employment. Of course the Linux driver is open source so it cannot be a business secret. But typically there is much more knowledge than just the Linux source code. Using business secrets after your employment is most likely enforcable in many legislations. Damages or criminal charges or both.
That is a fair point to make, and indeed if you look at the commits for other very vendor specific open source network interfaces (like Intel's 10Gbps and 100Gbps NICs), the manufacturer has a very close relationship to publishing drivers for this sort of stuff.
Go as far back as the year 2004 and Intel's first generation of PCI-X (not PCI-E!) very expensive 10Gbps NICs for servers, and their FreeBSD drivers. Look at the man pages for them and the @intel.com email addresses who wrote the drivers and the man page.
In the case of something like an ethernet card the only persons who might have the appropriate knowledge to write a stable kernel driver probably are the same ones who designed it.
> only persons who might have the appropriate knowledge
Sometimes though the community doesn't want just the knowledge of the corporation, we want it plus more.
We don't want DVD region restrictions. We don't want GPUs artificially restricted from mining Ethereum. These are the kind of things where an open source person can give a pull request to the repo to include an awesome feature that enables the hardware to do more than it is advertised to do and shove it to their corporate ass. That's the spirit of Linux.
If someone was able to make the IBM hardware do something that it was artificially restricted from doing, they should be able to issue a pull request to the repo and get it committed.
I absolutely agree - in the case of Intel, they've been relatively benevolent and open about publishing the full details of drivers for their NICs, because they have a market demand to sell more NICs.
If there were some hidden feature that was not enabled on an Intel 100Gbps NIC, which could be enabled in an open source driver, I'm 100% in favor of doing that. Thankfully there isn't (all praise to our benevolent corporate overlords), but I can certainly see a scenario with another vendor where there might be.
I hope that if Intel were to ever go down the route of big ugly closed source binary blob to make a 100Gbps NIC function properly, that people would go buy hardware from another vendor. With some basic consumer grade 1Gbps ethernet stuff you can see this now on a base debian install, where you need to enable the 'non-free' repo and install a .deb for a Broadcom provided driver to make a NIC work. Because their driver is considerably less freely licensed than Intel's. One of the reasons why I try to steer away from any Broadcom network interfaces whenever possible.
Or in any other category of hardware. With the current chip shortage and lack of viable competing options, it really sucks that there's literally two high performance GPU vendors that exist on the planet, Nvidia or AMD/ATI, and no other choices.
To use most SFP+'s with Intel NICs, one has to load ixgbe with allow_unsupported_sfp=1 due to Intel's wanking. Ultimately this isn't a huge deal, but it's still an instance of corporate crap needlessly complicating Free software.
Another popular solution in an environment where you might have to support six different vendors' equipment, some of which is closed source (juniper, etc) and demands certain SFP+ EEPROM codes, from one pool of spare equipment, is to purchase the optics with blank eeproms and a coding box to write the vendor ID code onto them over i2c bus as needed. There's four or five transceiver companies I can think of now which provide the solution to do that.
But thanks to open source, being able to look at the driver and understanding how that SFP check is done, some people at the Serve The Home forum were able to figure out which EEPROM bit needs to be flipped for these cards to accept any and all SFP modules: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-i...
> We don't want GPUs artificially restricted from mining Ethereum.
Oh let's not make sweeping statements haha, I want to play video games much more than I want the ice caps to melt so some ancaps can play multiplayer excel. I'm not usually onboard with vendor restrictions like these, but if the card self-destructed Inspector Gadget style when it detected crypto mining, I'd be okay with that.
And I say that as someone who has turned off their in-wall space heater and replaced it with a 3090 mining ETH when idle. No e-waste, no wasted power, (in this case) just a heater that pays you back.
> much more than I want the ice caps to melt so some ancaps can play multiplayer excel.
brings to mind something I saw recently: "What is bitcoin? Well, it's like if you left your car idling 24x7 it would produce solved sudokus you can trade for black tar heroin"
Someone else mentioned heat pumps to me in this context too, I'm unfortunately really limited in what I can use in my apartment. It's a condo complex made of brick put up in 1906 - without heating or air conditioning. I'm not in a position to install external hardware. My parents have a heat pump set-up in their house though!
Well I am not an ancap and I have not been one since I was a teen I believe, however most of the mining isn’t done by some “ancaps” it’s done in China and Eastern Europe by groups of people that couldn’t care less about the NAP or Hoppianism.
We have to stop just blaming the massive burden of polluting and contamination in small personal people when it is usually conglomerates and corporations or similar entities.
So if you want to be mad at anyone probably point your finger at China before blaming your local teenager gadsen flag squad they aren’t even tickling the ice caps.
Not only that but having money that the governments and such can’t control can really make a difference in the life’s of people living in oppressive regimes whose preoccupations daily are much more tangible than le big scary global warming.
Don Becker had the advantage of working for NASA, a.k.a. the federal government, where everything is automatically public domain. Even classified information developed by the U.S. government isn't copyrighted, it just isn't available (to me, and probably not to you). We owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Becker as a true public servant.
Completely agree. There is a huge iceberg hidden underneath this single commit message and all we are doing here is speculate how it looks like.
And it's also pretty certain that posting this message into the eternal commit history can easily be interpreted as trying to make IBM look bad, which tends to not sit well with any employer.
"Hey John, there are legal reasons preventing us from working on VNIC even in an unofficial capacity as IBM employees. I've attached a document outlining the company position as background. Let's chat more about this on Thursday in our 1:1."
I suspect from the tone of the email that the manager may have already tried that route and gotten pushback. It feels very much like a manager who is tired of the excuses and trying to be as unequivocal as possible so as to be 100% clear.
And that's assuming we even have an accurate statement, which is a big assumption. Aside from the missing context, we frankly don't know that any of this text was written by the manager.
Depending on internal policy, this could be reason enough for the employee to be fired.
Unless explicitly authorised, I’m not allowed to quote an internal email on a public forum.
As I read it, it looks like it was decided, by IBM, the employee would no longer be a maintainer and adding a personal email to the list of maintainers was a misrepresentation of their current role.
I suspect that HR is probably discussing termination procedure as we speak and this will proceed unless the PR pressure is overwhelming and makes it difficult to retaliate.
To quote the quote given in the commit:
"As an IBM employee, you are not allowed to use your gmail account to work in any way on VNIC. You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby". You are an IBM employee 100% of the time. Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change."
Your interpretation is not obvious to me at all. To me that reads that the person was using is private address to work on the kernel as a hobby and IBM objected because he is considered to 100% at IBM. My interpretation of this is of the typical corporate overreach were they claim everything you do is theirs.
You and the person you responded to interpreted it exactly the same way, I think.
This IBM employee isn't allowed to contribute to VNIC. Why? I dunno. But the problem isn't if a personal address is used or not, but rather this specific IBM employee can't contribute to VNIC.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the fairness of that, but rather that the OP was saying "it wouldn't have been any better if they had used their IBM address."
To your last point... I doubt that's what's happening here. I don't think IBM wants ownership, but rather is protecting themselves from any sort of litigation or undermining an agreement.
You're correct, I actually misread the original poster (or he/she edited their post?).
Anyway, after reading a bit more through the thread, I did not realise that VNIC is a IBM driver. It seems like the real situation is a bit more complex.
I would say though, the "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time" is really bad management IMO.
If you signed an employment contract with a company, you are employed by them until the time either of you terminates it. Whether you are actively doing work for them at the moment is irrelevant to that.
Either side can stipulate anything they want in that contract, other than what is disallowed by contract and labor laws (and of course your rights). You can, at any time, decide to terminate that contract yourself though (usually?).
IBM probably doesn't want what they might consider proprietary code leaking out, and they probably don't want to have to vet every employee contribution considered "personal" to external projects, so their solution is simple, don't allow employees to do so.
The solution for employees is equally as simple. Don't work for companies that go this route if you care about that. The market will sort it out (and has, to a large degree. Many companies specifically don't care about this).
Signing away your free time is literally what work is. Bit even if we take that you mean the rest of your free time, how do you enforce that without making a hash of it? Am I allowed to work for my company's biggest competitor in my free time? What if I donate that time?
I agree some things should be private, but if I'm paid to program, it makes sense in some instances to say I can't sell or give away that skill they are paying for. Enforcing the details is hard, which is also why I don't want the government doing a shit job of it, and the market can sort that out. Let the government define my rights (which is much more encompassing and harder to circumvent anyway), and the market define the details. If I don't like what is being offered, I'll go elsewhere.
Sure. Signing away your free time to make it work is fine. Signing away your free time into some limbo where it's still legally your free time, but your employer claims it's not yours, is not.
When free time becomes work, that should also entail a lot of responsibilities on the part of the one paying for the work (such as, for example, paying).
Re the market solving it: maybe it does solve it for you and me. The skillset we're likely to have just based on the fact that we're hanging out on HN means we have a lot of relative power. I for one want a society where also the less fortunate (=a looooot of people), and the far less fortunate, can live worthy lives.
It is your free time, and you can do whatever you want for yourself. The problem is when you market it to someone else, whether for money or donated, if you agreed to such restrictions. Then that free time is work, whether you enjoy it or get paid for it, which is why the employer in this case thought they had a right to restrict it.
I too wish there was a sane way to deal with this, but I don't think this is a case that's so simple that that you can pass a law that isn't so narrow as to be useless that also isn't so vague that it takes a hatchet to important legitimate concerns for employers in a way that would be bad overall. Passing a law about rights of a person would be a sane first step, but how do you do that while also protecting IP and trade secrets, etc? That's why I recommend to get mark we t, not because the market gets everything right, but because I'm this case I think it's better than a law that I not only think won't be done well in the end, I'm not even sure it could be done well. And to be clear, many states already have laws that curtail the worst excesses of contracts like these (such as limiting what type of work qualifies based on what you are employed for), and I think expanding those that work to help this to other states is a good thing, as well as small targeted additions. I just don't think it's something we can use legislation alone to fix.
> Passing a law about rights of a person would be a sane first step, but how do you do that while also protecting IP and trade secrets, etc?
We already have laws for these things. If you steal IP your employer already has recourse, so why do they need to control your non work time in addition to the legal avenues already at their disposal?
We handle those through contract law to some extent. Any law passed to prevent employer overreach would presumably be neutering contract law in some manner. I'm not sure there won't be unintended consequences we'll have to deal with for a long time.
> why do they need to control your non work time in addition to the legal avenues already at their disposal?
They aren't controlling your non-work time, they're controlling your non-work output. You can use that work, they just don't want you selling or giving it away, as they view that as competing with what you've contracted to provide them exclusively (because you signed an exclusive contract).
> Either side can stipulate anything they want in that contract, other than what is disallowed by contract and labor laws (and of course your rights).
Guess what this is disallowed by!
You can write "oh yeah by the way we're not going to pay you for ~75% of your working hours because we're cheap bastards" in the contract all you want, that doesn't make it legal. If they want you to work for them 168 hours a week, they need to pay for it.
That's not what they said, and that's not what I said. They didn't say the personon the clock doing a task for them of the time, they said the person was employed by them of the time. They were. You are employed right now by whoever signs your paychecks (assuming you have an employer). Employment is a contract, not a state you go into and out of on an hourly basis day by day. You may start work and stop work at different times on different days, but you are employed that entire period (this is also why you can't collect unemployment just because you haven't worked because you haven't been scheduled over a weekend).
People have been primed to assume some things about the statement presented (as with the root comment), but if you really examine it critically and rationally, you'll see it's not nearly as ludicrous as it sounds. Employers often put things in contracts that we take as obvious and most would agree should be allowed. At it's simplest level this is a non-compete agreement while that person is employed. Whether they are disallowed from offering their services to a competing company, or an open source project, IBM does not want them plying their skills elsewhere while they've contracted to ply them with IBM, and presumably as put that into the contract. Whether it's for an open source project or not is irrelevant, if that's what they agreed to in the contract (let's not act like an open source project can't provide competition, whether or not this one was).
I've outlined my thoughts on this in detail other places in this thread. I don't agree with contracts like this, and would attempt to not sign one if it was possible (but maybe if I was paid enough, it would be worthwhile). But I do think this is a case very easily handled by contract law, and better handled by it than some ham-fisted legislation that is easy to work around and has unintended consequences.
> this is also why you can't collect unemployment just because you haven't worked because you haven't been scheduled over a weekend
Presumably this works differently in your country, but I could 100% collect unemployment benefits were I to work less than 25 hours in any given week, regardless of whether or not I had an active employment contract.
> if you really examine it critically and rationally, you'll see it's not nearly as ludicrous as it sounds
It is exactly as ludicrous as it sounds. A company pays you to do 8 hours of work. You go there and do the 8 hours of work that they paid you to do. You then go home and do something else in your free time, and they phone you up and tell you to stop doing that because they don't like it.
This is not acceptable behaviour.
> At it's simplest level this is a non-compete agreement while that person is employed.
Despite being legal, non-compete agreements are equally scummy, and I'm not sure why you think that this comparison is favourable to IBM. It's also important to note that non-compete agreements are only enforceable if there's demonstrable harm to the business that employs you, or you're taking intellectual property from said business to use yourself. IBM very clearly has no intention to respect those limitations, so they can get bent.
I don't understand how anyone could possibly read the sentence 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' and think that it sounds okay. No matter how much nuance or context you want to add, any company policy that results in someone typing those words is a gross overreach.
> I could 100% collect unemployment benefits were I to work less than 25 hours in any given week
That has nothing to do with that I said.
> You then go home and do something else in your free time, and they phone you up and tell you to stop doing that because they don't like it.
If you agreed not to do something in a contract, you shouldn't do it. There are obviously ways overreaches that should be protected from, but if someone comes to you and says here's a contract for $10,000, all you have to do is agree not to write any code for any companies or submit any code to open source projects and you sign that, should you be able to ignore that contract? If so, should you have to give the money back? In what way is this different than if it's an additional stipulation on your employment contract?
> Despite being legal, non-compete agreements are equally scummy, and I'm not sure why you think that this comparison is favourable to IBM.
Non-compete agreements for after your employment has ended are scummy. I see no problem with a company making your employment conditional on you not also working for a competitor at the same time, as long as that is clearly outlined up front.
> 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' and think that it sounds okay.
Because, contextually, what they are saying and is being left out is along the lines of "you agreed not to do this when we employed you. Stop doing this. It doesn't matter whether you use a work email or personal email to do this thing you agreed not to do, as long as you are employed by us. Stop now. If you don't stop, we'll fire you, and then you can do it all you want, but we won't be giving you the paycheck we agreed to, because part of that agreement was you would not do what you're doing now, because then you won't be employed by us."
I think that's an okay thing to request if the employee agreed to that stipulation in advance. I would try not to agree with anything like that, but if they offered enough money, I might. I don't think there's some fundamental right of mine to contribute to an open source project that should be prevented from being negotiated in a contract.
You either believe that someone should be able to offer you some amount of money for you to agree to behave a certain way by not doing some things, or you don't. If you think that shouldn't be allowed, then you disagree with a huge chunk of contract law. If you propose we change contract law at such a fundamental level, I suggest you also provide for how you don't collapse the economy at the same time.
If the clause is illegal, yeah. In almost every jurisdiction on the planet, a contract containing a clause that is illegal renders that clause invalid, and the rest of the contract stands. So why would I not collect my free $10,000 and continue doing whatever I wanted in my free time? Sucks for the company offering that contract, but maybe they should avoid trying to break the law next time my contract is up for negotiation.
> If you think that shouldn't be allowed, then you disagree with a huge chunk of contract law.
Correct. Fortunately I also agree with some parts of contract law. Specifically the parts that would make 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' an illegal thing to actually enforce.
To me the worst part is the `100% of the time` interpretation.. Seriously I thought my employment agreement mentioned only 40 hrs a week??.. Unless it has explicit clauses to mention to contributing to VNIC without IBM ID, this is just some one interpreting legal rule for their convenience or what they wanto make a stand of.
You might be an hourly employee or a contractor. Most don't.
Your "employee handbook" likely mentions not causing damage to the company brand or taking any action detrimental to the company even in your personal time.
Stupid jurisdiction if writing code on your free time with an explicit disclaimer that it has nothing to do with Company can be construed as hurting Company's image.
While working for the previous employer (multinational corporation), my contract had a clause that any work/personal projects that I do outside work must be approved, in writing. Doesn't matter if I only work on them outside working hours. Their justification was that the rest of the time is for me to rest/ I was employed full-time, so they were not comfortable with me e.g. working a second job & being tired at work.
It does sound like a bit of an overreach, and I'm not sure how enforceable their contract really was, but the language was unambiguous and unsanctioned contributions to open source projects were definitely out of the question.
(I'm currently working at a startup, they don't have this problem/ contributions to OSS are encouraged, I just have too much work to do already :D )
I think the argument is that you gain some specialized knowledge at work, so they want to prevent you from working on a competing product using that knowledge, personal, OSS or otherwise. At some point a lawyer probably reduced the sentence to simply require approval in writing for anything to avoid any expensive disputes.
No, they had that one too, it's the non-compete clause basically (it extends a few years after your employment terminates, if I'm not wrong). Again, not sure it's enforceable, I'm not aware of them ever trying to. Probably they might if you were in a leadership position and tried to outright move to a direct competitor? But I never heard of it used for a "regular" employee so I basically ignored its existence.
Personally, at that point I would start demanding 24/7 pay coverage. You don't get to tell me what I can or cannot do outside of the hours that you're paying for.
In all honesty, this should not even be possible to require in a contract (and I'm fairly sure that it indeed isn't, in most EU countries), considering that employment contracts are negotiated from a position of power imbalance.
I'm in the EU; I mentioned that I don't think the verbiage was really enforceable, but that can't stop them from putting it in. Fortunately it never came to be tested in a court of law :)
Power imbalance is wildly dependant on a lot of factors and it's already reflected in the contract clauses and compensation. I personally wouldn't care about that clause and I'd happily work for them (provided my requirements were met - and, to be fair, a company coming up with this clauses probably wouldn't).
This is usually a problem for lower paid jobs, not for developers.
Hiring a good developer is hard, hiring a good cleaner is simple.
Law and application seem to differ/lag somewhat. Each influences the other. It’s worth being aware that neither fully determines the other, and that each evolves in parallel. We live in an organic world where things are not as well defined and predictable as the typical programmer might wish. To thrive, one must dirty oneself in the actual code, rather than get bogged down in the terminology of the man page.
So the big companies have a cartel to suppress their workers' salaries, and then they write "we pay you more than we ought to" into their contracts.
They probably believe people should feel honored to work for them for free, but paying you less than fair market salary and taking away all your hobbies is the most they can get.
Worked for an MSP that basically required 24/7 availability but wouldn't pay for it. They got around it by saying things like your ringer must be at 100% volume at all times, you must be working within 30 minutes of receiving the call, and then you must clock out the minute you stop working. They'd want you to wake up at 2:03 AM, work on something for 5 minutes, and clock out at 2:08 AM. The way the rules you were wrote, you could get in trouble for just about everything except not answering the phone entirely. So guess what I started doing?
The general position under English law is that IP rights created by an employee within the course of employment automatically belong to the employer; where there is any doubt as to whether an employee or their employer owns IP rights, the relevant legislation largely favours employers."
It's been that way for decades, while the UK was in EU.
I had to get it written into an employment contract that Open Source activity outside of work was my own.
I mean, fair enough if the contract mentions working in your free time to use / contribute to the IP of the company you work for (or that of the competitor), but I was more referring to working on hobby projects not relating to your work.
The situation isn't any different in NL either. Although there is no blanket your-company-owns-your-**s policy (your IPs), the general rule is: if you create something in your spare time that your employer could well have paid you for (i.e. it's in line with your job description), the IP belongs to your employer.
The idea behind this is that your employer pays not just for your time, but also for the skills you acquire during your work. Therefore, the output of those skills has at least partial ownership. There's a huge gray area which contains liabilities and opportunities for both sides, which is why most companies insist on signing off on personal projects. The alternative is fighting it out in front of a judge, should it ever come to that.
It certainly was a thing working for Telefónica in Germany. We needed to get separate permission to be allowed to do work/volunteering outside of the main role, which was conditional on you being able to complete the main task.
I heard a story of someone who had this permission revoked because they worked weekends as a DJ in Berlin, and would often take sick days/turn up late on Mondays to deal with the hangover.
Yes, this is normal in Germany. The idea is that you're legally only allowed to work 40-ish hours per week and your employer is legally required to ensure that you observe break times and at least 24 hours of rest on the weekend. In turn you are usually required to get signoff if you want to do another job on the side, though I think volunteer work is generally allowed. I have no idea how this works for part-time jobs and why your employer can allow you to take a second job if doing so will violate the legally mandated recovery periods.
It should be legal. I dont see the problem with having terms like this. There are plenty of other companies to choose from if you are a developer. From a company perspective it makes 100% sense to have terms that restricts when a developer is allowed to work on a project.
It should not be legal. You exchange your time to produce money for the company, and that's it. You should be able to do whatever you want out of the company hours, and I don't see how that can be a problem. It makes 100% sense from a worker perspective to not have your company have complete control of you. There are plenty of other workers to choose from if you are a company, in case you are dissatisfied with an employee.
I get the feeling, just want to say that it all worked out well (towards "spectacularly well") for me. It's easy to say "for any amount of money" in the abstract, but that job directly and indirectly took me from "relatively poor" to "fatfire-level-of-rich". And didn't _really_ restrict me in any way - I got the written approvals to teach when needed, and contributing to OSS was possible (though there was some red tape).
I'm by no mean advocating that one should ignore the contracts, but I do think you need to look at the larger picture... sometimes it just is overzealous lawyers and not necessarily a bad company to work for.
You went pretty fast from "you are just a cog in the machine and there is no 'you'. Sign here please" to "signing away your soul to the Devil".
I understand the first statement/feeling, and my reply was meant to say that it might be ok to take the risk that "you are just a cog in the machine". As for the latter statement, not sure where you got that one from, there was nothing in the contract that suggested it (and there was nothing evil in the job that I was originally hired for, either - it was code intelligence (code hinting) for PHP).
When I was an intern at IBM the contract basically said they owned everything you produce, whether you do it in the office or not. They seemed to take that quite seriously.
I think it’s an IP thing, they view it as their IP the employee is contributing so it should be in their name.
This was ~20 years ago but it seems not much has changed.
The reason why they do this is because you could pretend your are working for them but actually do something else on the side during the time they are paying you. The only way to avoid is is by completely banning other work. It really makes sense from their side
You could, and then you either are still able to deliver an amount of work that makes them happy, in which case, why do they care - or you can't deliver an acceptable amount of work and they can fire you for performance. No need to own 100% of anyone's time.
This makes zero sense, and sounds more corporate slave-ownership.
If you are going to pay the going hourly rate for 168 hours a week, yeah maybe there's something.
But if you only pay for 40 hours a week, that's what you get: not a single minute outside of that. And especially not something the person did or invented at home.
> I get the impression most people don't read their contract.
We read them, one of two situations occurs:
1. We don't care and sign it.
2. We raise a stink about it and either they change it or we don't take the job.
My current employer had the clause because it was standard boilerplate contract, but when I expressed my concerns over it and told them I wouldn't sign with it, they amended the contract to make sure nothing in it would impede my own projects and company.
Now on my 1-on-1 my CEO often asks me how my side business is doing and gives me advice as needed about building a business.
Did you not read what I wrote? I said you could work during company time and that is why they do it. It's not just that. You can realistically only work a few hours a day properly so if you spend all your thinking power on hobbies there is little left for the guy who pays you
All intellectual property I create is owned by my employer, per terms of employment. My employer doesn't care about my musical performances, since no one else would, either ;-) North Carolina is friendlier to employers than California in thus regard.
I had a job offer from an IBM company once. The offer negotiation part happened directly with IBM. The salary went to hell because I live in Canada, and although the position was fully remote, they took away the juicy US salary and offered me a sucky Canadian one. The main reason I work remote is to not get stuck with a Canadian salary. In addition they stated that everything I do at any time is owned by them. I had a side project, so I applied for an exemption. It went through legal for a couple weeks. It was denied.
I turned the job down. The whole process wasted tons of my time and theirs and could have been avoided if they had just been upfront about their policies instead of writing useless crap about how great their culture is in the job ad.
Sounds like an (overt) attempt at getting all their contributions to come from a `@linux.ibm.com` account, which might make sense depending on what their arrangement with IBM is?
For example if IBM were paying them a full-time salary to maintain VNIC as a representative of IBM then it makes sense for IBM to ask for what they're paying for, or at least to not let them add "personal" contributions to the mix?
Source for my conjecture is:
> Lijun Pan <ljp@linux.ibm.com>
And:
> Lijun Pan <lijunp213@gmail.com>
So they want them to use the IBM email association all of the time
Here the issue is that he was an official contributor as part of an IBM team working on this driver for IBM hardware... and that IBM decided they did not want him to do this anymore. He then changed the maintainer file to point to his personal email.
Setting up to do it outside of work as a "hobby" might still be being a good open source citizen, but it doesn't mean that IBM may not have some legitimate concerns. If there's e.g. a bad interpersonal situation on the team, IBM might not want him to interact with other members of that group anymore. Or, since he's likely handled proprietary IBM information relating to that hardware, ongoing work on the subsystem outside of an official capacity could be problematic.
I have never had a positive experience with anything related to IBM. Granted, my experience has been few and far between, but I'm guessing that's a good thing.
Another data point, my dad worked as a tech from IBM for many, many years.
He’s never had a positive experience either for himself or the customers he did work for.
IBM tried to shaft their customers at every possible point and the only reason IBM held to their contracts is because he wouldn’t lie for them and no one else was willing to take responsibility.
The ideal outcome here is the person was going to remove their personal email address. The author of that message could achieve it in a few ways:
- Speak to the person like a professional and explain the company policy and give a little context on why things are the way they are
- Take a combative, aggressive tone and demand it be changed
The first builds trust, the second breeds resentment and hurts company image if it leaks (I guess when people resent you they'll take micro aggressive actions to embarrass you by leaking it).
A company where people who take the 2nd path are in a position of power is a toxic workplace with many broken systems in place.
I'm interpreting this comment is saying we think this is a "leak" and that it unprofessional to show off internal politics with our bosses.
Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
Yep, definitely agree with this. Management is always testing out the waters, seeing how much they can push a worker to work. They want more units of productivity out of you for the price they're paying you. But we can fight back to some degree, simply by saying 'no' to things, but we gotta be careful. Saying no too often will land you in the no-promotion bucket when reviews come around, or can get you canned. But politics is politics, and we're all forced into playing it.
Although, when a group of workers decide to band together to fight back, that's a different story, and that's when things get interesting. :D
> I'm interpreting this comment is saying we think this is a "leak" and that it unprofessional to show off internal politics with our bosses.
Yes, I think including an exchange with your manager in a commit message is a leak, and one way the employee was able to get back at their manager for the draconian response. I don't think it's unprofessional. It's well within their right to write whatever commit message they want to an open source project. No identifiable information was included.
> Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
No, my response is when you have people in charge who can't see the cost / benefit of actions and take the one that's emotionally charged (maybe because they were annoyed or had a rough day) but ultimately damaging over one that is more beneficial (to the employee, to the company, to the manager's career), you may be working in a dysfunctional company.
> At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
I don't have an opinion on this. You can be "combative" in a professional way. You challenge process changes with data. Asking questions is not combative, by the way.
We have no evidence that the first thing wasn't attempted.
Furthermore, from the phrasing of the message (refuting the idea that one can contribute to one's employer's project as a hobby), we have some evidence that there was previous context, unknown to us.
It's a factually accurate statement; I don't think IBM is claiming rights to 100% of their time, just that they are bound by their contractual obligations as an employee (and function as a representative of the company) 100% of the time - which is true and correct.
It's not abnormal for employers to put conduct clauses in contracts that impact life outside of your work hours. For example, you are likely not allowed to say bad things about your employer online, even if you are off the clock. Athletes often have clauses about not being allowed to do certain risky activities to avoid injury. You might be on call during off hours.
Trying to pull a move like "I only have to follow NDAs when I'm clocked in and using my work email account" wouldn't fly at ANY company I've ever worked at.
This feels like there's a lot of context missing. Does anyone know anything more about this story?
This contributor was specifically listed as a reviewer on the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver", and it sounds like the order (from a manager?) was specifically to do with contributing to this specific VNIC driver.
> IBM employee forced to stop kernel work for using personal email address
This seems inaccurate. More accurate appears to be “IBM employee not allowed to change to using a personal email address and claim of ‘hobby’ to workaround instruction not to work on open source project.”
Can you explain how, exactly, for three IBM employees, it's their paid job, and for a fourth IBM employee, it's a hobby (but until recently it was also their paid job)?
If you do it and you aren't paid or otherwise compelled to do it, it's a hobby. Simple as that.
-----
The point isn't that hobbies are legally sacrosanct. They clearly aren't. But it's not the company's place to categorize what I do in my free time beyond what's stipulated my contract. "Hobby" in scare quotes has no purpose in the manager's email.
We don't know the backstory. There could have been confrontation or issues between the other IBM employees working on this with the employee asked to stop. Having him then demand to still work with those employees through the kernel as a "hobby" would then be problematic.
> But it's not the company's place to categorize what I do in my free time beyond what's stipulated my contract.
IBM is probably legally OK telling him he can't work on the kernel on a driver for IBM hardware that he started working on as part of a team at IBM without facing employment consequences.
> IBM is probably legally OK telling him he can't work on the kernel on a driver for IBM hardware that he started working on as part of a team at IBM without facing employment consequences.
Yes I am not contesting this. But that's because the contract allows IBM to mess with hobbies, not because some things, by virtue of being under the pervue of the contract, are no longer hobbies.
I am not going to allow somebody else's contract to indirectly change the meaning of english words.
> We don't know the backstory. There could have been confrontation or issues between the other IBM employees working on this with the employee asked to stop. Having him then demand to still work with those employees through the kernel as a "hobby" would then be problematic.
That doesn't make it not a hobby though. IBM has contractual power (unfortunately) to control their employees outside conributions, but it's philosophically dangerous extend that contractual control to re characterize what it means to contribute to Linux on your own time.
> That doesn't make it not a hobby though. IBM has contractual power (unfortunately) to control their employees outside conributions, but it's philosophically dangerous extend that contractual control to re characterize what it means to contribute to Linux on your own time.
Again, we don't have the context. It sounds like something an exasperated manager might write if an employee is told not to work on it anymore and they change it to their personal email and say they're going to work on it as a "hobby".
If he's an IBM employee 100% of the time, then I expect he's only getting paid for 33+1/3 % of his workday. I hope he demands the other 66+2/3 %, granting, of course, a 1 time exception on lack of payment to make this change.
Talking to old-timers, IBM back in the old days used to be very much like this.
Anything more public than reading a lesson in church services or maybe being a scoutmaster was viewed as very suspect and subject to highly manipulative pushback.
I am an X is not the same as I have an X. I'm not expected to identify as my health insurance 24/7 and never accept any medical treatment that my health insurance does approve under any circumstances.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 91.5 ms ] threadWhat a joke - hope the salary makes this indentured servitude worth it.
> Because they might try to take an investment, and the investor would say, “prove to me that you’re not going to get sued by some disgruntled ex-employee who claims to have invented the things that you’re selling.” The company wants to be able to pull out a list of all current and past employees, and show a contract from every single one of them assigning inventions to the company.
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
The people in charge are sociopaths.
That’s what a combination of salaried employment with pay and job duties qualifying for FLSA exemption is, in effect.
That might be OK within the parameters of their delusional mindset, but it's still fucked up and should not be allowed.
I was gearing my response in terms of what seems reasonable to expect... but yeah I'm sure everyone would try to stretch themselves to absorb more capital.
It is expected and known that if you do something like respond to a 0130 in the morning emergency and work the issue until 0430, then go to sleep, that you're going to sleep until whenever you wake up in the mid afternoon and probably not be useful for any other tasks that day.
I should point out that the salaried employees expected to respond to such things are compensated appropriately, and the general practice is to have a group of people so that each person is only on-call for some portion of each month.
The rank and file NOC employees and fiber splicers, field crews, field technicians are hourly employees and get overtime for incidents as described above. Depending on the state and labor laws they're also paid an hourly rate simply for being on-call, even if nothing happens, for the duration of their on-call rotation week(s).
I was just trying to highlight that I personally hate "core hours" and that if I'm on a marathon coding session from 9pm to 4am, and I'm intermittently unavailable from some arbitrary time (say 11:15am to 11:50am) and then I get a bunch of messages from bosses saying "where were you??" and I then explain that I was actually writing code, point to some commits and say "see? I did all this stuff" and they say "you are expected to work from 9am to 6pm" it feels like a slap in the face. I think good management should accept that people aren't robots (unless there is an outage, fair enough) and consider people's working preferences in their decisions.
Anyways, I'm sure you have some awesome war stories with deployments/maintenance events. You should share them sometime :D
If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
If you even go to your secret other home you haven't told them about in another state (or worse, another country), and that creates tax withholding obligations in that state, they may not fire you, but they will be very displeased.
Incentivize people to take on-call time and those who are fit will take it.
I for one am perfectly capable of advanced software engineering work but I am NOT capable of compromising my sleep without causing serious heart arrythmias. Some other person might have to deal with a baby. Some other person might sleep early and do meditation at that hour because it helps prevent panic attacks during the day. Everyone is different, and personal time and rest time should be respected. There is so much behind the curtain of off-work time that employers don't see, and don't need to see, they just need to respect that time.
But in my experience, every single place I've worked, has had insane on call hours. And you were ALWAYS expected to do your normal work on top of the on call hours and you were NEVER given time to fix the issue that woke you up in the middle of the night.
Until the actually engineers/developers are in charge of their own schedules on call shifts will be fucking bullshit.
If it's just a question of product uptime then you should have enough people and pay people extra to be on-call. And don't deploy things at 5pm on a Friday.
Does your contract actually say this explicitly? Mine doesn't and I'm not sure it'd even be enforceable if it did.
> If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Now, it is true that this isn't common in software development jobs, but employment contracts for software development jobs aren't magic -- they're pretty much the same as any other employment contract.
(It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
I am also floored that someone actually thinks that their job is something they're paid to do 24/7.
If this sounds to you like shit sandwich, that's because it is one, even if some people manage to make it work with less hours than norm.
moonlighting clauses are fairly standard and I'd be surprised if your contract doesn't include one.
> You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Yes, people violate their employment contracts.
> (It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
The enforceability of moonlight contracts may vary. For example working at a software company and moonlighting as a barista is less likely to be enforceable than working at a software company and moonlighting at another (or moonlighting as a freelance developer), at least in the US, the second is probably a violation.
Not that this matters in the US since you're usually at will anyway.
It doesn't say, of course, that I'm supposed to go home. I can go to the bar, the library, the bowling alley, whatever. But it does say that I can't hold a second paid job (and it does demand that I truthfully tell them where I live). I am very much being paid not to work a second job.
Maybe you aren't! But I am, this is fairly normal for salaried positions in America, it's almost certainly enforceable, and it's something I willingly signed and accepted when I took this job.
I am aware there are a large number of people working non-salaried jobs who work multiple jobs. This thread is specifically about salaried jobs.
More relevantly to the thread, my contract also says that any work I do which is related to my employer's actual business is owned by my employer, whether or not I do it on work time or at work. I paid actual lawyers to review that portion of the contract before I signed it, and they told me it is absolutely enforceable. In this case, the question is whether an IBM employee can hack on an IBM-authored, IBM-maintained driver for IBM computers, contributing to which used to be part of their job on the side. It would be absolutely defensible for IBM to say they own this work regardless of when it happens, and it would be frankly surprising if the employment contract did not say that.
Hmm, do they? It's not in my contract, and (unfortunately) the labour law in Ontario for my profession doesn't support it either. We are expected to be "deliverable based" I think, rather than effort/work based. IANAL etc, but my observation is that Hourly employees are compensated for their hours; but it's less straightforward for salaried workers.
I'm in IT, and IIRC IT is one of the professions where salaried FTEs are not entitled to overtime in Ontario, but all of the salaried FTE contracts I've ever signed since the mid 90s had a specified number (usually 40) of working hours.
1: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/010285#BK20
No, because if you have a $90k salary and job duties that qualify for wage and hour exemption under FLSA and any applicable state labor law at that salary, then, there is no minimum hourly wage.
That’s what it means to be exempt from wage and hour rules.
For FLSA, “computer related” work is exempt at a salary of just over $35k.
MY current job has me on "salary" but they require me to work 40 hours a week... and have a time clocking program.
They aren't willing to pay me overtime even when I am contacted (with urgency) on the weekends and after hours...
I think that's why there are lots of startups in california.
In other states, employers in some cases can own everything, up to and including ideas in your head.
I don't know an example state that is the other side of the coin, pro-employer, but maybe texas? (uneducated guess)
Every company I've worked for has had it this way.
Funnily enough I release some of my work under BSD-style licenses while company stuff is all GPL :D
[2 sidenotes though: 1) I'm in the EU, and 2) a previous job, working on the very exact same open source project, had a clause like that.]
Assuming the outside work was performed on the employee's own time/equipment and doesn't compete with the employer's business, such contracts would be unenforceable in California. See section 2870 of the California Labor Code: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
The rule actually encompasses more than simple competition, but in any case work on OS components for an alternative (and therefore competing) OS for the employer’s hardware for which they also sell proprietary OS software does compete with the employer’s business, so... (The particular thing the employee was denied permission to work on seems to be VNIC for IBM Power)
> (1) 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 or ...
I am not a lawyer, but I think it would not be unreasonable to believe that work on the kernel would be related to IBM's business (like RedHat).
Its not just that it doesn't compete with the employer's business but if it is related to the employer's business.
Furthermore, while the own time/equipment is there, there is also trade secret information mentioned beyond the time and equipment constraint.
And it really has the tone of just because you do it on your own time, with your own personal email as a “hobby” doesn’t mean you can use it as a loophole to get around restrictions IBM employees might have.
So, for example, if IBM isn’t allowed to contribute to a specific project for legal or contractual reasons, an employee doing so “in their own time” would not be a defensible argument.
If I want to fix a bug in an esoteric Scheme implementation OR a bug in a JDK or PHP I have to ask for permission even though it is on my own time. I already volunteer more time than I am paid to my employer, but I have to ask for permission for something they have literally no interest in.
This is bullshit.
It's not unreasonable to review and modify the proposed contract that an employer offers. As skilled employees who's services are in demand, you've got a good chance of them coming to the table on that.
-signed,
Arthur Collé
You are subject to IBM trade secret law 100% of the time. Just because you only get paid for 8 hours of work a day doesn't mean you can use your 9th hour to tell people all about trade secrets. You are, in fact, paid to adhere to the terms of your employment contract 24/7.
I happen to be an IBM employee. I don't WORK 24x7 (well, not most weeks... ;), but "an IBM employee" is a state flag permanently assigned to me until explicitly changed:). I don't even feel it's debatable from a strictly semantic point of view. (I am many other things as well, FWIW:)
Hopefully starting from point of agreement, if at 9pm I log on to hacker news and start singing praises to IBM or complaining about its work or musing on its share price or revealing insider information, it would be a relevant disclosable piece of information that "I'm an IBM employee", no?
Never a company policy, just those few bad people giving it a bad name...
But, i know, those few dicks. Not. The. Company.
here is one of them https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8ae28677533d6d71a84fd7...
(Disclaimer: not a lawyer.)
In this case, the employee had been part of the team maintaining it at IBM in an official capacity... and then IBM apparently decided they did not want him to work with that team anymore. In turn, he changed the maintainers file to point to his personal email address, and the managers involved were predictably not amused.
As a side note, really often we get asked to measure our open-source contributions, or get measured by some sort of analysis of a project. It is always an under-estimate because of all the non-redhat.com accounts that we use.
Almost all decent software companies have some kind of allowance for personal contribution to free software. IBM can't possibly be paying enough to attract people from these other places.
Really hard to understand how IBM somehow has to have such rules, but everyone else has contributing employees with no problems...
But they didn't, and if it's just like this - that's straight A-grade bullshit.
At this point we can't rule out that the employee cut the most damning part of an email out of context, put it in the commit message, and submitted this post on HN themselves (it's posted by a throwaway, so it's likely someone intimately involved in the case, not someone who just stumbled across it).
That said, fundamentally, the question is whether you trust in Lijun Pan to represent the situation without distorting it. Without evidence to the contrary my personal assumption is to start with a little "trust credit" and take it as it is — for now…
I use VNIC on RedHat. I am also an IBM shareholder. This is outrageous in both cases.
At another company, I might have made it happen. But I do not have enough contacts to make it happen there.
Someone, please get the manager and whoever wrote that policy fired.
Thx God you don't "have enough contacts"!
... I think I'd rather have the other guy as manager than you - there's a CHANCE that guy is not short tempered trigger happy a hole (slim as it may be;)
>
>Thx God you don't "have enough contacts"!
>
>... I think I'd rather have the other guy as manager than you - there's a CHANCE that guy is not short tempered trigger happy a hole (slim as it may be;)
Get lost with that name-calling nonsense.
Why?
2. Because a few years ago, I could have, but right now, I can't because I'm fully retired of the software world to learn about restaurants.
3. Because by default, I take the side of the Chinese employee.
If the manager is innocent, he certainly has nothing to fear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of the 4 comments you've posted with this account, two have been impeccable and two have been egregious. We want the former and not the latter! If you read the guidelines, it will be easy to tell which are which.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No bad feelings, I think it is for the best.
Would you mind please deleting all my posts and comments?
I do not see how to do that. I will delete my account after that. Alternatively, you can do it yourself if you prefer.
IBM allows open source work. But there are rules, particularly about transparency. Just consider the sco lawsuit that won't die, and you may get an inkling why. This person appears to be in the open source / linux part of ibm. IBMers all must accept open source contribution guidelines. It sounds like this person simply didn't fully follow. Managers response may have been heavy handed but again none of us here knows details unless somebody provides them.
I notice there's four other ibm addresses so there is a story there.
Disclaimer and disclosure - IBMer who contributed openly and with management awareness and never got this kind of stern instruction :-/
When it comes to open source contributions, both business conduct guidelines and open source mandatory yearly certs are unambiguous about transparency and approval of open source contributions. So it's pretty mandatory I think to inform, and limited if any impetus not to open open about it.
Working for a big corporation is a bit cyberpunky/Snowcrashy in that way I suppose.
Might also be a question of tracking a "conflict of interest", where the professional in question might work on a similar proprietary product inside the company.
IBM certainly allows you to do your side gigs, but you need to be transparent with the company about what it is and that there is no conflict with your work.
Unless proprietary tech is used, I think I would advocate for laws protecting people from being restricted working on projects that provides such a public good... but that is another argument entirely.
That's such a wide ranging statement, I'm kinda surprised the person writing it didn't stop and think "Yeah that sounds horrible...I can't believe I just typed that..."
I imagine if I'd worked with legal on something like this as the manager, they'd have advised me to convey the reasoning in a verbal, non-recorded meeting, and then for confirmation just issue a terse command with limited leak damage potential: "As discussed, please remove yourself..."
(The current title is "IBM employee forced to stop kernel work for using personal email address", which is an interpretation likely missing context)
Manager: You're not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm doing it on my spare time!
Manager: You're still not allowed to contribute to VNIC.
Employee: But I'm using my personal email.
Manager: * the email quoted *
---
It feels like someone who's hit the end of their rope with a long back-and-forth and is trying to close any remaining loopholes just to be done with the conversation.
This manager could be an asshole, or he could just be exasperated after previous communication with the employee. Point is, we just don't know, and it's dangerous to draw conclusions based on the single email that the aggrieved individual chose to post.
Then they are a very poor manager. That kind of tone and language should never be used. If it has gotten to that point, then the issue should be escalated to HR. But it doesn't sound at all like they're exasperated. It sounds like they're a bully.
The manager may have sent the email, but legal and/or employee relations wrote that.
Pretty much anyone who goes through someone’s posting history to find something then post it out of context to make someone look bad is someone who is not acting in good faith. Usually, the motive is to be a bully.
It’s not removing context. It’s conversation drift, which frequently happens in online conversations. The post I was replying to mentioned Twitter, and it’s well known that some Twitter users will go though someone’s old blog or what not to find “a juicy, negative soundbite”. There’s even an expression for it: “offense archaeology”.
Please do not make bad faith accusations without looking at the full context of the conversation, which includes the post I was replying to. I don’t know what your intentions were making that reply, but it comes off to me as rude.
> It’s conversation drift
You were quoting something that was being directly applied to the article. If you were only talking about twitter it's on you to make that clear. To me, your post very much reads as talking about both.
> I have to make this public.
Good. Someone clarifying what they meant should be public.
Once IBM Legal gets involved, you toe the line or get fired.
All communication, inherently, must be intepreted. Administrative actions and warnings have no special exemption from this.
Sorry but that violates FLSA. You're only an employee when you're doing work. They don't own you.
That would instantly make me start to execute on becoming an IBM employee 0% of my time.
I make this crystal clear whenever signing an “inventions” clause, and I avoid companies which make, say, DNS servers, for exactly that reason.
In the current employment environment where employers do assert rights over the output of employees, it's not that strange that the employer would instruct the employee to not muddy the context of the contributions.
This is reasonably separable from whether this is a good way to organize things as a society.
Is the way this was done maybe a bit hidebound, corporate and uncharitable? Yeah. It's IBM, duh. But absent other evidence it doesn't seem like this devleoper is being pulled off a project for using a personal email.
The important bit might be: what state he is in. Then to a lesser extent, what kind of work he does for IBM and what kind of work he does on the kernel.
There’s more going on here than is visible from the out-of-context quote in the commit message.
there is this stipulation of using a clean room in which to introduce your idea in order not to be sued for “stealing” intellectual property.
And often times, the same person cannot be used in that clean room.
Such an action would only decrease developer goodwill towards IBM. Needless to say, IBM is already not one of the "cool" companies to work for.
Although if this happened and legitimate code was rejected by IBM, what could happen is a community backlash against IBM as a maintainer and the code could enter that way.
I'd assume the person has received confidential information about the IBM technology in question during his employment. Of course the Linux driver is open source so it cannot be a business secret. But typically there is much more knowledge than just the Linux source code. Using business secrets after your employment is most likely enforcable in many legislations. Damages or criminal charges or both.
Go as far back as the year 2004 and Intel's first generation of PCI-X (not PCI-E!) very expensive 10Gbps NICs for servers, and their FreeBSD drivers. Look at the man pages for them and the @intel.com email addresses who wrote the drivers and the man page.
In the case of something like an ethernet card the only persons who might have the appropriate knowledge to write a stable kernel driver probably are the same ones who designed it.
Sometimes though the community doesn't want just the knowledge of the corporation, we want it plus more.
We don't want DVD region restrictions. We don't want GPUs artificially restricted from mining Ethereum. These are the kind of things where an open source person can give a pull request to the repo to include an awesome feature that enables the hardware to do more than it is advertised to do and shove it to their corporate ass. That's the spirit of Linux.
If someone was able to make the IBM hardware do something that it was artificially restricted from doing, they should be able to issue a pull request to the repo and get it committed.
If there were some hidden feature that was not enabled on an Intel 100Gbps NIC, which could be enabled in an open source driver, I'm 100% in favor of doing that. Thankfully there isn't (all praise to our benevolent corporate overlords), but I can certainly see a scenario with another vendor where there might be.
I hope that if Intel were to ever go down the route of big ugly closed source binary blob to make a 100Gbps NIC function properly, that people would go buy hardware from another vendor. With some basic consumer grade 1Gbps ethernet stuff you can see this now on a base debian install, where you need to enable the 'non-free' repo and install a .deb for a Broadcom provided driver to make a NIC work. Because their driver is considerably less freely licensed than Intel's. One of the reasons why I try to steer away from any Broadcom network interfaces whenever possible.
Or in any other category of hardware. With the current chip shortage and lack of viable competing options, it really sucks that there's literally two high performance GPU vendors that exist on the planet, Nvidia or AMD/ATI, and no other choices.
But thanks to open source, being able to look at the driver and understanding how that SFP check is done, some people at the Serve The Home forum were able to figure out which EEPROM bit needs to be flipped for these cards to accept any and all SFP modules: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-i...
I saw that and wrote an automated patcher as a quick python hack to automate that: https://gist.github.com/ixs/dbaac42730dea9bd124f26cbd439c58e
Oh let's not make sweeping statements haha, I want to play video games much more than I want the ice caps to melt so some ancaps can play multiplayer excel. I'm not usually onboard with vendor restrictions like these, but if the card self-destructed Inspector Gadget style when it detected crypto mining, I'd be okay with that.
And I say that as someone who has turned off their in-wall space heater and replaced it with a 3090 mining ETH when idle. No e-waste, no wasted power, (in this case) just a heater that pays you back.
brings to mind something I saw recently: "What is bitcoin? Well, it's like if you left your car idling 24x7 it would produce solved sudokus you can trade for black tar heroin"
Electric heating can be much more efficient than what's effectively resistive heating with 500%+ efficiencies being possible.
Search for "heat pumps" or watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
Watched the video by the way, thanks!
Well I am not an ancap and I have not been one since I was a teen I believe, however most of the mining isn’t done by some “ancaps” it’s done in China and Eastern Europe by groups of people that couldn’t care less about the NAP or Hoppianism.
We have to stop just blaming the massive burden of polluting and contamination in small personal people when it is usually conglomerates and corporations or similar entities.
So if you want to be mad at anyone probably point your finger at China before blaming your local teenager gadsen flag squad they aren’t even tickling the ice caps.
Not only that but having money that the governments and such can’t control can really make a difference in the life’s of people living in oppressive regimes whose preoccupations daily are much more tangible than le big scary global warming.
/me runs off to google
https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/tux/net/donald-becker/
It wasn't the point being raised, however, which addressed knowledge requirements of writing network interface drivers.
And it's also pretty certain that posting this message into the eternal commit history can easily be interpreted as trying to make IBM look bad, which tends to not sit well with any employer.
"Hey John, there are legal reasons preventing us from working on VNIC even in an unofficial capacity as IBM employees. I've attached a document outlining the company position as background. Let's chat more about this on Thursday in our 1:1."
And that's assuming we even have an accurate statement, which is a big assumption. Aside from the missing context, we frankly don't know that any of this text was written by the manager.
The employer ultimately has all the power here. Bullying ... doesn't add much.
Unless explicitly authorised, I’m not allowed to quote an internal email on a public forum.
As I read it, it looks like it was decided, by IBM, the employee would no longer be a maintainer and adding a personal email to the list of maintainers was a misrepresentation of their current role.
IBM's bad-will generation here is large.
Your interpretation is not obvious to me at all. To me that reads that the person was using is private address to work on the kernel as a hobby and IBM objected because he is considered to 100% at IBM. My interpretation of this is of the typical corporate overreach were they claim everything you do is theirs.
This IBM employee isn't allowed to contribute to VNIC. Why? I dunno. But the problem isn't if a personal address is used or not, but rather this specific IBM employee can't contribute to VNIC.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the fairness of that, but rather that the OP was saying "it wouldn't have been any better if they had used their IBM address."
To your last point... I doubt that's what's happening here. I don't think IBM wants ownership, but rather is protecting themselves from any sort of litigation or undermining an agreement.
Anyway, after reading a bit more through the thread, I did not realise that VNIC is a IBM driver. It seems like the real situation is a bit more complex.
I would say though, the "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time" is really bad management IMO.
I hope their pay reflects that and is 3x the average.
Either side can stipulate anything they want in that contract, other than what is disallowed by contract and labor laws (and of course your rights). You can, at any time, decide to terminate that contract yourself though (usually?).
IBM probably doesn't want what they might consider proprietary code leaking out, and they probably don't want to have to vet every employee contribution considered "personal" to external projects, so their solution is simple, don't allow employees to do so.
The solution for employees is equally as simple. Don't work for companies that go this route if you care about that. The market will sort it out (and has, to a large degree. Many companies specifically don't care about this).
I agree some things should be private, but if I'm paid to program, it makes sense in some instances to say I can't sell or give away that skill they are paying for. Enforcing the details is hard, which is also why I don't want the government doing a shit job of it, and the market can sort that out. Let the government define my rights (which is much more encompassing and harder to circumvent anyway), and the market define the details. If I don't like what is being offered, I'll go elsewhere.
When free time becomes work, that should also entail a lot of responsibilities on the part of the one paying for the work (such as, for example, paying).
Re the market solving it: maybe it does solve it for you and me. The skillset we're likely to have just based on the fact that we're hanging out on HN means we have a lot of relative power. I for one want a society where also the less fortunate (=a looooot of people), and the far less fortunate, can live worthy lives.
I too wish there was a sane way to deal with this, but I don't think this is a case that's so simple that that you can pass a law that isn't so narrow as to be useless that also isn't so vague that it takes a hatchet to important legitimate concerns for employers in a way that would be bad overall. Passing a law about rights of a person would be a sane first step, but how do you do that while also protecting IP and trade secrets, etc? That's why I recommend to get mark we t, not because the market gets everything right, but because I'm this case I think it's better than a law that I not only think won't be done well in the end, I'm not even sure it could be done well. And to be clear, many states already have laws that curtail the worst excesses of contracts like these (such as limiting what type of work qualifies based on what you are employed for), and I think expanding those that work to help this to other states is a good thing, as well as small targeted additions. I just don't think it's something we can use legislation alone to fix.
We already have laws for these things. If you steal IP your employer already has recourse, so why do they need to control your non work time in addition to the legal avenues already at their disposal?
We handle those through contract law to some extent. Any law passed to prevent employer overreach would presumably be neutering contract law in some manner. I'm not sure there won't be unintended consequences we'll have to deal with for a long time.
> why do they need to control your non work time in addition to the legal avenues already at their disposal?
They aren't controlling your non-work time, they're controlling your non-work output. You can use that work, they just don't want you selling or giving it away, as they view that as competing with what you've contracted to provide them exclusively (because you signed an exclusive contract).
Guess what this is disallowed by!
You can write "oh yeah by the way we're not going to pay you for ~75% of your working hours because we're cheap bastards" in the contract all you want, that doesn't make it legal. If they want you to work for them 168 hours a week, they need to pay for it.
People have been primed to assume some things about the statement presented (as with the root comment), but if you really examine it critically and rationally, you'll see it's not nearly as ludicrous as it sounds. Employers often put things in contracts that we take as obvious and most would agree should be allowed. At it's simplest level this is a non-compete agreement while that person is employed. Whether they are disallowed from offering their services to a competing company, or an open source project, IBM does not want them plying their skills elsewhere while they've contracted to ply them with IBM, and presumably as put that into the contract. Whether it's for an open source project or not is irrelevant, if that's what they agreed to in the contract (let's not act like an open source project can't provide competition, whether or not this one was).
I've outlined my thoughts on this in detail other places in this thread. I don't agree with contracts like this, and would attempt to not sign one if it was possible (but maybe if I was paid enough, it would be worthwhile). But I do think this is a case very easily handled by contract law, and better handled by it than some ham-fisted legislation that is easy to work around and has unintended consequences.
Presumably this works differently in your country, but I could 100% collect unemployment benefits were I to work less than 25 hours in any given week, regardless of whether or not I had an active employment contract.
> if you really examine it critically and rationally, you'll see it's not nearly as ludicrous as it sounds
It is exactly as ludicrous as it sounds. A company pays you to do 8 hours of work. You go there and do the 8 hours of work that they paid you to do. You then go home and do something else in your free time, and they phone you up and tell you to stop doing that because they don't like it.
This is not acceptable behaviour.
> At it's simplest level this is a non-compete agreement while that person is employed.
Despite being legal, non-compete agreements are equally scummy, and I'm not sure why you think that this comparison is favourable to IBM. It's also important to note that non-compete agreements are only enforceable if there's demonstrable harm to the business that employs you, or you're taking intellectual property from said business to use yourself. IBM very clearly has no intention to respect those limitations, so they can get bent.
I don't understand how anyone could possibly read the sentence 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' and think that it sounds okay. No matter how much nuance or context you want to add, any company policy that results in someone typing those words is a gross overreach.
That has nothing to do with that I said.
> You then go home and do something else in your free time, and they phone you up and tell you to stop doing that because they don't like it.
If you agreed not to do something in a contract, you shouldn't do it. There are obviously ways overreaches that should be protected from, but if someone comes to you and says here's a contract for $10,000, all you have to do is agree not to write any code for any companies or submit any code to open source projects and you sign that, should you be able to ignore that contract? If so, should you have to give the money back? In what way is this different than if it's an additional stipulation on your employment contract?
> Despite being legal, non-compete agreements are equally scummy, and I'm not sure why you think that this comparison is favourable to IBM.
Non-compete agreements for after your employment has ended are scummy. I see no problem with a company making your employment conditional on you not also working for a competitor at the same time, as long as that is clearly outlined up front.
> 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' and think that it sounds okay.
Because, contextually, what they are saying and is being left out is along the lines of "you agreed not to do this when we employed you. Stop doing this. It doesn't matter whether you use a work email or personal email to do this thing you agreed not to do, as long as you are employed by us. Stop now. If you don't stop, we'll fire you, and then you can do it all you want, but we won't be giving you the paycheck we agreed to, because part of that agreement was you would not do what you're doing now, because then you won't be employed by us."
I think that's an okay thing to request if the employee agreed to that stipulation in advance. I would try not to agree with anything like that, but if they offered enough money, I might. I don't think there's some fundamental right of mine to contribute to an open source project that should be prevented from being negotiated in a contract.
You either believe that someone should be able to offer you some amount of money for you to agree to behave a certain way by not doing some things, or you don't. If you think that shouldn't be allowed, then you disagree with a huge chunk of contract law. If you propose we change contract law at such a fundamental level, I suggest you also provide for how you don't collapse the economy at the same time.
If the clause is illegal, yeah. In almost every jurisdiction on the planet, a contract containing a clause that is illegal renders that clause invalid, and the rest of the contract stands. So why would I not collect my free $10,000 and continue doing whatever I wanted in my free time? Sucks for the company offering that contract, but maybe they should avoid trying to break the law next time my contract is up for negotiation.
> If you think that shouldn't be allowed, then you disagree with a huge chunk of contract law.
Correct. Fortunately I also agree with some parts of contract law. Specifically the parts that would make 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' an illegal thing to actually enforce.
Your "employee handbook" likely mentions not causing damage to the company brand or taking any action detrimental to the company even in your personal time.
It does sound like a bit of an overreach, and I'm not sure how enforceable their contract really was, but the language was unambiguous and unsanctioned contributions to open source projects were definitely out of the question.
(I'm currently working at a startup, they don't have this problem/ contributions to OSS are encouraged, I just have too much work to do already :D )
This is usually a problem for lower paid jobs, not for developers.
Hiring a good developer is hard, hiring a good cleaner is simple.
They probably believe people should feel honored to work for them for free, but paying you less than fair market salary and taking away all your hobbies is the most they can get.
I might be wrong but I don't think this kind of thing would work (legally speaking) in the EU.
The general position under English law is that IP rights created by an employee within the course of employment automatically belong to the employer; where there is any doubt as to whether an employee or their employer owns IP rights, the relevant legislation largely favours employers."
It's been that way for decades, while the UK was in EU.
I had to get it written into an employment contract that Open Source activity outside of work was my own.
The idea behind this is that your employer pays not just for your time, but also for the skills you acquire during your work. Therefore, the output of those skills has at least partial ownership. There's a huge gray area which contains liabilities and opportunities for both sides, which is why most companies insist on signing off on personal projects. The alternative is fighting it out in front of a judge, should it ever come to that.
I heard a story of someone who had this permission revoked because they worked weekends as a DJ in Berlin, and would often take sick days/turn up late on Mondays to deal with the hangover.
Also it is legally enforceable as in it can be considered a valid and completely legal exception to usual termination protection.
It should be if consideration is provided.
I do think there's an argument to be made whether the base salary counts as consideration for things outside of the defined working hours though.
F that, no way in hell I'd sign that contract, for any amount of money.
It's legalese for "you are just a cog in the machine and there is no 'you'. Sign here please".
I'm by no mean advocating that one should ignore the contracts, but I do think you need to look at the larger picture... sometimes it just is overzealous lawyers and not necessarily a bad company to work for.
I understand the first statement/feeling, and my reply was meant to say that it might be ok to take the risk that "you are just a cog in the machine". As for the latter statement, not sure where you got that one from, there was nothing in the contract that suggested it (and there was nothing evil in the job that I was originally hired for, either - it was code intelligence (code hinting) for PHP).
You just need to know when to quit
I think it’s an IP thing, they view it as their IP the employee is contributing so it should be in their name.
This was ~20 years ago but it seems not much has changed.
If you are going to pay the going hourly rate for 168 hours a week, yeah maybe there's something.
But if you only pay for 40 hours a week, that's what you get: not a single minute outside of that. And especially not something the person did or invented at home.
> It's pretty common in the US industry to have these type of IP clauses.
We read them, one of two situations occurs:
1. We don't care and sign it.
2. We raise a stink about it and either they change it or we don't take the job.
My current employer had the clause because it was standard boilerplate contract, but when I expressed my concerns over it and told them I wouldn't sign with it, they amended the contract to make sure nothing in it would impede my own projects and company.
Now on my 1-on-1 my CEO often asks me how my side business is doing and gives me advice as needed about building a business.
I turned the job down. The whole process wasted tons of my time and theirs and could have been avoided if they had just been upfront about their policies instead of writing useless crap about how great their culture is in the job ad.
For example if IBM were paying them a full-time salary to maintain VNIC as a representative of IBM then it makes sense for IBM to ask for what they're paying for, or at least to not let them add "personal" contributions to the mix?
Source for my conjecture is:
> Lijun Pan <ljp@linux.ibm.com>
And:
> Lijun Pan <lijunp213@gmail.com>
So they want them to use the IBM email association all of the time
Good open source citizen, if you ask me.
He’s never had a positive experience either for himself or the customers he did work for.
IBM tried to shaft their customers at every possible point and the only reason IBM held to their contracts is because he wouldn’t lie for them and no one else was willing to take responsibility.
- Speak to the person like a professional and explain the company policy and give a little context on why things are the way they are
- Take a combative, aggressive tone and demand it be changed
The first builds trust, the second breeds resentment and hurts company image if it leaks (I guess when people resent you they'll take micro aggressive actions to embarrass you by leaking it).
A company where people who take the 2nd path are in a position of power is a toxic workplace with many broken systems in place.
Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
Although, when a group of workers decide to band together to fight back, that's a different story, and that's when things get interesting. :D
Yes, I think including an exchange with your manager in a commit message is a leak, and one way the employee was able to get back at their manager for the draconian response. I don't think it's unprofessional. It's well within their right to write whatever commit message they want to an open source project. No identifiable information was included.
> Your response to a working in a dysfunctional workplace is to go soft and hope for the best? Sure, us white collar workers we think ourselves as so international and sophisticated and professional, but all this shame-driven toxic positivity gets us is a dystopian workplace.
No, my response is when you have people in charge who can't see the cost / benefit of actions and take the one that's emotionally charged (maybe because they were annoyed or had a rough day) but ultimately damaging over one that is more beneficial (to the employee, to the company, to the manager's career), you may be working in a dysfunctional company.
> At an old job I had, we got our functional workplace back by being combative against rude dysfunctional rules such as "no hobbies allowed" There was no reason to give in to shame and limit ourselves to peaceful, professional, and toxic positivity if all that would have got us in this situation is workplace dysfunction.
I don't have an opinion on this. You can be "combative" in a professional way. You challenge process changes with data. Asking questions is not combative, by the way.
Furthermore, from the phrasing of the message (refuting the idea that one can contribute to one's employer's project as a hobby), we have some evidence that there was previous context, unknown to us.
We also have evidence that the employee in question was previously contributing on behalf of their employer, and for some reason, recently stopped: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net.g...
This is abusive. 100% or their (probably) 40h/week contract. Other than that, they are owner of their own time.
This contributor was specifically listed as a reviewer on the "IBM Power SRIOV Virtual NIC Device Driver", and it sounds like the order (from a manager?) was specifically to do with contributing to this specific VNIC driver.
This seems inaccurate. More accurate appears to be “IBM employee not allowed to change to using a personal email address and claim of ‘hobby’ to workaround instruction not to work on open source project.”
-----
The point isn't that hobbies are legally sacrosanct. They clearly aren't. But it's not the company's place to categorize what I do in my free time beyond what's stipulated my contract. "Hobby" in scare quotes has no purpose in the manager's email.
> But it's not the company's place to categorize what I do in my free time beyond what's stipulated my contract.
IBM is probably legally OK telling him he can't work on the kernel on a driver for IBM hardware that he started working on as part of a team at IBM without facing employment consequences.
Yes I am not contesting this. But that's because the contract allows IBM to mess with hobbies, not because some things, by virtue of being under the pervue of the contract, are no longer hobbies.
I am not going to allow somebody else's contract to indirectly change the meaning of english words.
> We don't know the backstory. There could have been confrontation or issues between the other IBM employees working on this with the employee asked to stop. Having him then demand to still work with those employees through the kernel as a "hobby" would then be problematic.
That doesn't make it not a hobby though. IBM has contractual power (unfortunately) to control their employees outside conributions, but it's philosophically dangerous extend that contractual control to re characterize what it means to contribute to Linux on your own time.
Again, we don't have the context. It sounds like something an exasperated manager might write if an employee is told not to work on it anymore and they change it to their personal email and say they're going to work on it as a "hobby".
Ooh. I forgot weekends.
David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
is employed by Red Hat, which is a part of IBM.
No. No one sells their soul to the company store anymore. This IBM manager is living in the past.
Anything more public than reading a lesson in church services or maybe being a scoutmaster was viewed as very suspect and subject to highly manipulative pushback.