ContractPatch
sfconservancy.org
sfconservancy.org
Instead of a reactive strategy requiring individual developers to negotiate, a proactive solution might be better.
Create a certification for employers as open source friendly based on their employment contracts. Make a website where developers can see if the company they are looking at is certified open source friendly. And it will likely be more effective if recruiters start hearing from a lot of their prospects that the company isn’t being considered because they are not certified.
This will likely go further than requiring individual developers to have to negotiate it as a one off every time. There is power in collective action.
One time a company I worked for used some of my personal code in their product, with my permission. When they merged with another company, the lawyers tried to take ownership of it.
I pointed out that my contract was different to the standard contract and they had no claim. They then came back saying that I had to assume any liability they might face for using it. I demurred and said they were free to remove my code if they had any concerns. They kept the code.
What I learned from this is that even if you trust the people and the organisation you work with, you have to protect your work. The lawyers were just doing their job in the merger.
That's a fairly scary consequence of not using a standard Free and Open Source software licence. As you made a special arrangement to permit them to use the code, I presume your code wasn't already publicly available under a standard copycenter licence?
In those days, I either wasn't aware, or there weren't widely available and understood licenses you could use.
I agree that this was a scary consequence of making my software available. I paid a lot more attention to licensing after that experience, and I now use standard open source licenses to protect myself as well as the work.
If you live in CA at least you have some protections via labor code 2870-2872.
https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/who-owns-employees-i...
So terms don't have to be strictly "enforeceable" to have the desired effect from the company's perspective.
Can anybody here add some context about the need and the main purpose for the SFC? (in opposition to the clearly stated goals of the FSF)
(It's more accurate to say that SF Conservancy is an offshoot of the Software Freedom Law Center than it is of the FSF.)
As for disagreement with the FSF and "principles of software freedom": Conservancy's principles are Stallman's four freedoms. They aren't "pushing" "ethical licensing"; they hosted a conference that had several talks about it; just as LibrePlanet, the FSF-hosted conference, has also had talks exploring formulations of software ethics that differ from the four freedoms. Indeed, the linked page calls out that so-called "ethical licensing" is non-Free, and advocates for "ethical employment contracts" instead. Any substantive disagreement between Conservancy and the FSF must be fairly recent: Until late-2019 the president of the SF Conservancy was also a member of the FSF's board of directors.
Happy New Year! :)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25266072 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25263435 [2] https://marcinciura.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/cf-slides.pd...
You get no opportunity to redline anything -- unless the signature-requestor decides to grant you that permission, which they basically never do, because DocuSign has become "take it or leave it as a service". Sort of like how arbitration has become "no class action as a service". I mean sure, in theory arbitration clauses can allow for class action, but I've never heard of that happening.
You might say that people can always ask for a wording change out-of-band via email, but this neglects the subtle dynamics of contract negotiations -- not just in employment agreements, but elsewhere (my pet example: the aggressive NDAs put forth by semiconductor foundries).
A lot of negotiation is about who ends up looking unreasonable if talks break down, and the reputational cost of appearing unreasonable. If you send back a signed document with a totally reasonable redline, the other side looks unreasonable for not countersigning and moving forward. With DocuSign's "adhesion as a service" the other side will just claim that their legal department doesn't read external emails so they never got your proposal.
I'm not sure where feel that the "or leave it" option is any stronger than a paper contract where you send it back unsigned with modifications.
Particularly the third paragraph.