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Ask HN: Company claimed open source software

2 pointstheoutfield6 comments

The company I work for was given grant money by the Canadian government to invest in research and development. I was told by my boss that because xx% of my wage was paid by the goverment that I was required to do community work that supported Universities (this was a lie). I wrote a substantial piece of software that required me to pay for the development tools. More than half of the work was done at my home unpaid. The software was open sourced with my bosses approval. During a routine IT audit at our facility corporate IT found out about the project and demanded it be taken down immediately and that there was no agreement with the government whatsoever.

I never kept track of the amount of time that I worked on the project since it was open source work and so couldn't accurately say how may hours were involved but it was over the course of a couple of years and was in the thousands of hours researching and writing / testing code. Needless to say the company refused to pay me for anything because I couldn't prove exactly how many hours I worked on the software. The story gets even more crazy but it's too long to go into.

Any thoughts on how you would handle something like this?

Best thing to do is talk to a lawyer and remember any and all work for the government has to be tracked and logged. If it was not an official government contract that was funded and awarded, no work should have been done by anyone unless the government agreed to pay for the work or the company agreed to pay you with the risk that they would not have been paid by the government to compensate you work. Either way, you should not have been doing any free work for the company and any tools or hardware you used should have been purchased by the company unless you are a contractor.

If you are a contractor then all hours you worked should have been paid for and tracked by you. Just make sure you talk with a lawyer to help fix things up for you as it sounds like something shady may have occurred.

Learn from it and move on.

Next time, get it in writing, and keep great records.

I have it in writing.

If the amount of money, or your desire to keep the software open source is big enough - talk to a lawyer.

It depends on how much you care about your job.

If you have it in writing (and it's clear) you can fork the software at the last commit. Be aware that you risk being fired. OTOH they are risking a wrongful termination claim / lawsuit. Option 3 is to negotiate back pay for the work you did based on your best estimate of the cost.

There's also some risk to your boss -if he's given you permission in writing to release the code under an open source license, but he did not have the internal authority to do that - it's not impossible that'd risk him getting fired (instead of or as well as you).

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