Rackspace, a company that is built on open source technologies, had a policy that required its employees to get permission from a lawyer before contributing back to any open source projects during their free time. And now one of their executives is patting himself on the back for relaxing this awful policy. Am I reading this correctly?
It is a matter of responsibility. Anyone, in any organization, has a responsibility to make sure that the organization's "assets," however defined, are properly handled. Agree or not, intellectual property is one of the assets, and we had a responsibility to make sure that we followed the proper procedures before it was handed out.
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.
Do you think Heroku requires its employees to get permission before hacking on OSS on the weekend? Facebook? Twitter? Even Amazon, which contributes relatively little, only asks that its employees use their private email addresses.
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.
There's nothing wrong with being proud about promoting something that is beneficial to all of us. I'm not sure why you are trying to put your own feelings in this and be negative about it, but whatever. I'm glad they are continuing to push on transparency and trust. It's going to be critical in the coming years. I, for one, am glad they are making it a priority.
And to answer your question, VanL is both an engineer and an attorney. I'm not sure he'd label himself as an executive either, but I'll let him speak for himself on that topic - as he should be allowed.
"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.
"
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)
I stand corrected, then. I had thought that Google's policy allowed contributions, but not under the employee's own copyright. I thought there was an additional step to get that approved.
Comments
Rackspace, a company that is built on open source technologies, had a policy that required its employees to get permission from a lawyer before contributing back to any open source projects during their free time. And now one of their executives is patting himself on the back for relaxing this awful policy. Am I reading this correctly?
It is a matter of responsibility. Anyone, in any organization, has a responsibility to make sure that the organization's "assets," however defined, are properly handled. Agree or not, intellectual property is one of the assets, and we had a responsibility to make sure that we followed the proper procedures before it was handed out.
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.
Do you think Heroku requires its employees to get permission before hacking on OSS on the weekend? Facebook? Twitter? Even Amazon, which contributes relatively little, only asks that its employees use their private email addresses.
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.
There's nothing wrong with being proud about promoting something that is beneficial to all of us. I'm not sure why you are trying to put your own feelings in this and be negative about it, but whatever. I'm glad they are continuing to push on transparency and trust. It's going to be critical in the coming years. I, for one, am glad they are making it a priority.
And to answer your question, VanL is both an engineer and an attorney. I'm not sure he'd label himself as an executive either, but I'll let him speak for himself on that topic - as he should be allowed.
"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. "
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)
DannyBee! Good to see you. Its been a long time.
I stand corrected, then. I had thought that Google's policy allowed contributions, but not under the employee's own copyright. I thought there was an additional step to get that approved.