> 1. Rackers are encouraged to contribute on their own time, and if they wish to contribute during work hours they must obtain approval from their manager.
> 2. If a Racker would like to contribute to a project that is directly competitive with Rackspace, we’d like to understand why before they contribute.
2 has got to mean
"If a Racker would like to contribute to a project that is directly competitive with Rackspace [during work hours], we’d like to understand why before they contribute."
otherwise, i don't think such a policy is even legal?
IP clauses like this are slightly more enforceable - all the employer has to do is prove you were employed at the employer when you started a company/made some code/wrote a book. See also: http://theemplawyerologist.com/2013/01/17/works-for-hire-and...
If you work at a company bigger than 10-15 employees, check your employment agreement. Rackspace's stance on this is highly unusual (I think even unique) for a company its size.
(Whether that sort of clause is enforceable in court is another question. IANAL.)
1. Whether it's valid or not may depend on prevailing state law that is in effect. Just because you sign a document saying "you own my brain 24x7" does not necessarily mean that it's the case.
2. These provisions are often negotiable. When I worked for Lulu.com, their IP Assignment paperwork was so onerous that they could have claimed to own a fantasy novel that I might write in my spare time. I refused to sign until they made an exception. It took a while, but we worked something out that was reasonable.
3. A lot of times companies hand you a big stack of paperwork to sign, but have no process to audit that it all got returned and signed. Other than tax and insurance related stuff, your best bet may be to put it in your desk drawer and forget about it until somebody asks. There's a good chance nobody ever will. I worked at a job 4.5 years once and never did sign any of the NDA / IP Assignment / etc. crap. It was still in my desk drawer the day I left, right where I put it the day they gave it to me. shrug
4. Always talk to an actual lawyer if you have serious concerns about this stuff. :-)
What we did today was make a statement that encouraging participation in various communities and allowing Rackers to develop their skills whenever and however they want is both better for everyone and more consistent with our values. As obvious as this may be to you, we needed to do this in the proper way so that we could satisfy our duties to our shareholders.
I challenge you to find a public company with a similar policy. I have been around a long time, and I've never found one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that you've decided to hold yourself above the lowest common denominator of tech companies. I just don't think you should be congratulating yourself publicly on HN for it.
In this industry, having a solid background in open source contributions is serious mark of credibility for any engineer. The rest of us are falling over ourselves to work with and encourage people that hack in their free time.
Are there any Rackspace engineers in the thread? Please tell me this is all legalese and nobody actually asks you to get your weekend pull requests approved by a legal department.
Google's policy was, for years, identical to this :)
(It is only slightly more onerous now, in that we ask to see the first few patches you contribute, mainly the result of too high a rate of unreasonable judgement generating actual issues, which I chalk up to statistics and having a really large number of engineers now)
This could be worded more clearly to indicate what about this is new; I can't think of an alternate interpretation that doesn't suggest Rackspace previously forbid employees from contributing to OSS on their own time, which I assume (and surely hope) has never been the case.
Because employee code was technically the property of Rackspace, we had a policy that they needed to ask for permission before releasing it to the public under an open source license. But when we looked at our actual history, we saw that we were granting 100% of the requests.
This new policy grants pre-approval to all Rackers to contribute to open source projects under their own name, holding their own copyright. We even allow contributions that occur on Rackspace time using Rackspace resources, as long as their manager agrees that it is a good use of their at-work time.
VanL (I wrote the policy)
Such a policy seems impossible to reconcile with the statutory requirements for a work to be a work for hire, which (when based on employment status rather than specific commission of the work in question) is specifically limited to works that are "prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment", 17 USC Sec. 101 (emphasis added).
This is not universally true. I have never and would never work under such terms. Only work done on company equipment or assigned or materially related to the business should be owned by the company.
To position otherwise is to significantly stifle employees ability to pursue projects outside of work (even if they are generally approved)
Not many companies talk about their policies and since Rackspace doesn't do much distribution (most things run on the server), I'm curious how things are handled.
If your manager agrees that hacking on $PROJECT is a good idea, go for it.
VanL (I wrote the policy)
"You can claim a copyright, but only if you couldn't be successful enough to make money."
Sounds like a big "fuck you" to me. Other corporations just ignore side projects outside the problem domain of the business. By making this statement explicitly permitting open-source, it feels like the screws are setup for the moment someone wants to make money.
