[greggman2]

IANAL and I'm sure this will get downvoted since people won't like what I have to say.

I'd concentrate on the positive rather than the negative, that if you get to work on this project via your employer from this point on you'll be getting paid to do the thing you were doing for free.

Getting paid for past work seems unlikely. You already admitted you didn't care about compensation by open sourcing the project. You were willing to give it to anyone, including your own company as open source. Not that you can't ask, maybe they'll be nice about it, but just saying it's strange that before they asked you were giving it away for free to any company and now that they asked you want compensation.

To be harsh you arguably did something wrong by making something that directly competes with your employer. It doesn't matter that it was on your own time. It's called a "Duty of Loyalty" and basically means you can't get paid as an employee and at the same time stab them in the back by competing with them.

https://www.google.com/search?q=duty%20of%20loyalty%20employ...

Maybe you don't think it competes but you said yourself it directly relates to what they do so yes, as you admitted, you've cornered yourself in a bad place.

Some companies, like Google, have an easy way to get a signed contract saying they will not claim interest in your project before you start (or they'll point out it's a conflict of interest like if you said you wanted to make a cloud based mail service ... in which case my guess is they would try to get you to join the gmail team, contribute to it, or you could quit and start your cloud based emails start up). The point is they are upfront about the legal issues and provide a way to work out a solution. Most companies don't have a procedure for this until it's too late.

[rvnx]

Well, for Google it's not that ideal. Google claims 100% of the IP done inside and outside of your work.

"As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google. However, we understand and sympathize with the desire to explore and ship technology projects outside of Google."

[dmh2000]

If that's in the Google employment agreement, I salute them for using plain understandable wording, so one can agree or not. instead of EULA-ish doublespeak.

[mattrp]

I have this concern too that by putting something out there without permission as an employee you may have done harm to the company. You need a lawyer. You may also want to consider hiring a coach to help you develop a voice within the corporate setting so that you can better influence the direction of products without having to build an alternative in your precious spare time. And if the company doesn’t currently have policies like described above maybe this example can be used to help shape them with your input.

[mch82]

Can you please elaborate on “coach to help you develop a voice within the corporate setting”? What are these coaches called? Can you link to an example?

[mattrp]

It sounds like to me that rather than interact with his colleagues to ensure their enterprise product was built incorporating the approaches he took in his package, he just went a built his package in isolation and then pushed it to github. Was that because the organization was ignoring his input, or he wasn’t in the right position to influence the direction or maybe he saw an unserved niche that the company wasn’t serving. or maybe it was just a drive to do something that needed to be explored. Either way, something got created. And that’s good. You never want to stifle creation sometimes that drive to create outside of work helps exercise part of the brain that helps you break through hurdles at work. Whatever got produced was a gift. The question is now what to do with that gift? I get the sense that OP is searching for how exactly to communicate with his company. The advice to seek counsel is sound. But counsel isn’t going to all of a sudden make him a great strategic-thinking leader in the eyes of his employer. That is something that will take work and practice if that’s what he is seeking. He can read books, he can take classes or he can find a business coach that will give him critical feedback and mentoring. In the past senior members of the organization might mentor junior people into leadership positions but I think unfortunately that art has been lost. So probably the best path would be to find someone who can do this 1:1 outside the org.