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by georgeburdell 1778 days ago
As a dev at a large company, I'm wondering how the author went about open sourcing the side project. My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company. This company wouldn't have any motivation to let me open source the work I do, which in my case does not go into any product.

The reason I ask is that I have written, as part of my day job, a scientific library in C# that doesn't appear to have any public equivalent and I know addresses common tasks in the industry. I would love to open source it, if not for beer money, but for visibility to help my career --- I'm at that point where promotions only happen with externally-visible accomplishments.
4 comments
mwilliamson 1778 days ago
Author here! The open sourced code was rewritten from scratch, not least because the original version was in C# while the open source version is in JavaScript. So, the same idea, but an entirely new implementation.

I forget exactly what conversations I had, but it was also very clear that they had no problem with me doing so since it doesn't really have any connection with their core business. If I wanted to, I suspect I could have open sourced the original version so long as I stripped out the stuff that was specific to the company.

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drran 1778 days ago
> My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company.

Did you agree on the price of that extra work? If not, I recommend to set price prohibitively high, e.g. $100 per line of code or $1000 per hour of work. If your company really want to own your side project, then they will need to pay the requested price.

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georgeburdell 1778 days ago
The library was done as part of my day job. It was not a side project
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tyree731 1778 days ago
At my firm you can request that side projects not be subject to the company’s copyright agreement. The firm’s market is fairly specific, so most requests get approved.
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Lorean 1778 days ago
I'm afraid it's difficult to call something written "as part of their day job" a side project.
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conductr 1778 days ago
As a hack, could you use the work as inspiration to create a similar port in another language during off time?
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