I want to create a hobby project and release it under MIT. I work as a developer professionally and i have some clauses in my employment contract that gives any IP to my employer. My employer is open to amending these and/or adding exceptions for specific projects. Can anyone point to guidance resources on how to formulate such exceptions properly?
// EDIT: My contract is not totally strict, it refers to applicable laws and the wording is something like ‘knowledge gained through company activities belong to the company’, which is probably intentionally vague. Also: i like my job and employer and they are open to FOSS. My only concern is whether some higherups might disagree at a later point which is why i want to get the wording right. Will not spend money on a lawyer - it’s not that important to me. Thanks for sharing your experiences so far.
CC image ref.: https://thebluediamondgallery.com/legal/employment-contract.html
Try and get your employer to offer and agree to GitHub's BEIPA:
https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement
Very cool! This is what i was hoping to find - TY. Do you have it in your contract?
No, unfortunately
We (staff) asked for this, or some similar change to our contracts, and leadership refused
Our contracts/agreements currently state that any IP created in the course of doing our jobs or involving any employer-supplied equipment belongs to the employer
Leadership says they won't enforce this for dotfiles and other small personal non-competing code, but they also refuse to put that in writing :S
That said, most of us have tweaked our dotfiles, etc on work laptops for years and we've never had problems, so far leadership has kept their word