It does sound like a bit of an overreach, and I'm not sure how enforceable their contract really was, but the language was unambiguous and unsanctioned contributions to open source projects were definitely out of the question.

(I'm currently working at a startup, they don't have this problem/ contributions to OSS are encouraged, I just have too much work to do already :D )

F that, no way in hell I'd sign that contract, for any amount of money.

It's legalese for "you are just a cog in the machine and there is no 'you'. Sign here please".

I'm by no mean advocating that one should ignore the contracts, but I do think you need to look at the larger picture... sometimes it just is overzealous lawyers and not necessarily a bad company to work for.

You just need to know when to quit

I understand the first statement/feeling, and my reply was meant to say that it might be ok to take the risk that "you are just a cog in the machine". As for the latter statement, not sure where you got that one from, there was nothing in the contract that suggested it (and there was nothing evil in the job that I was originally hired for, either - it was code intelligence (code hinting) for PHP).

They probably believe people should feel honored to work for them for free, but paying you less than fair market salary and taking away all your hobbies is the most they can get.

This is usually a problem for lower paid jobs, not for developers.

Hiring a good developer is hard, hiring a good cleaner is simple.

I might be wrong but I don't think this kind of thing would work (legally speaking) in the EU.

The general position under English law is that IP rights created by an employee within the course of employment automatically belong to the employer; where there is any doubt as to whether an employee or their employer owns IP rights, the relevant legislation largely favours employers."

It's been that way for decades, while the UK was in EU.

I had to get it written into an employment contract that Open Source activity outside of work was my own.

The idea behind this is that your employer pays not just for your time, but also for the skills you acquire during your work. Therefore, the output of those skills has at least partial ownership. There's a huge gray area which contains liabilities and opportunities for both sides, which is why most companies insist on signing off on personal projects. The alternative is fighting it out in front of a judge, should it ever come to that.

I heard a story of someone who had this permission revoked because they worked weekends as a DJ in Berlin, and would often take sick days/turn up late on Mondays to deal with the hangover.

Also it is legally enforceable as in it can be considered a valid and completely legal exception to usual termination protection.

It should be if consideration is provided.

I do think there's an argument to be made whether the base salary counts as consideration for things outside of the defined working hours though.

I think it’s an IP thing, they view it as their IP the employee is contributing so it should be in their name.

This was ~20 years ago but it seems not much has changed.

If you are going to pay the going hourly rate for 168 hours a week, yeah maybe there's something.

But if you only pay for 40 hours a week, that's what you get: not a single minute outside of that. And especially not something the person did or invented at home.

We read them, one of two situations occurs:

1. We don't care and sign it.

2. We raise a stink about it and either they change it or we don't take the job.

My current employer had the clause because it was standard boilerplate contract, but when I expressed my concerns over it and told them I wouldn't sign with it, they amended the contract to make sure nothing in it would impede my own projects and company.

Now on my 1-on-1 my CEO often asks me how my side business is doing and gives me advice as needed about building a business.

> It's pretty common in the US industry to have these type of IP clauses.

Your "employee handbook" likely mentions not causing damage to the company brand or taking any action detrimental to the company even in your personal time.

I turned the job down. The whole process wasted tons of my time and theirs and could have been avoided if they had just been upfront about their policies instead of writing useless crap about how great their culture is in the job ad.

This IBM employee isn't allowed to contribute to VNIC. Why? I dunno. But the problem isn't if a personal address is used or not, but rather this specific IBM employee can't contribute to VNIC.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the fairness of that, but rather that the OP was saying "it wouldn't have been any better if they had used their IBM address."

To your last point... I doubt that's what's happening here. I don't think IBM wants ownership, but rather is protecting themselves from any sort of litigation or undermining an agreement.

Anyway, after reading a bit more through the thread, I did not realise that VNIC is a IBM driver. It seems like the real situation is a bit more complex.

I would say though, the "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time" is really bad management IMO.

I hope their pay reflects that and is 3x the average.

Either side can stipulate anything they want in that contract, other than what is disallowed by contract and labor laws (and of course your rights). You can, at any time, decide to terminate that contract yourself though (usually?).

IBM probably doesn't want what they might consider proprietary code leaking out, and they probably don't want to have to vet every employee contribution considered "personal" to external projects, so their solution is simple, don't allow employees to do so.

The solution for employees is equally as simple. Don't work for companies that go this route if you care about that. The market will sort it out (and has, to a large degree. Many companies specifically don't care about this).

I agree some things should be private, but if I'm paid to program, it makes sense in some instances to say I can't sell or give away that skill they are paying for. Enforcing the details is hard, which is also why I don't want the government doing a shit job of it, and the market can sort that out. Let the government define my rights (which is much more encompassing and harder to circumvent anyway), and the market define the details. If I don't like what is being offered, I'll go elsewhere.

When free time becomes work, that should also entail a lot of responsibilities on the part of the one paying for the work (such as, for example, paying).

Re the market solving it: maybe it does solve it for you and me. The skillset we're likely to have just based on the fact that we're hanging out on HN means we have a lot of relative power. I for one want a society where also the less fortunate (=a looooot of people), and the far less fortunate, can live worthy lives.

I too wish there was a sane way to deal with this, but I don't think this is a case that's so simple that that you can pass a law that isn't so narrow as to be useless that also isn't so vague that it takes a hatchet to important legitimate concerns for employers in a way that would be bad overall. Passing a law about rights of a person would be a sane first step, but how do you do that while also protecting IP and trade secrets, etc? That's why I recommend to get mark we t, not because the market gets everything right, but because I'm this case I think it's better than a law that I not only think won't be done well in the end, I'm not even sure it could be done well. And to be clear, many states already have laws that curtail the worst excesses of contracts like these (such as limiting what type of work qualifies based on what you are employed for), and I think expanding those that work to help this to other states is a good thing, as well as small targeted additions. I just don't think it's something we can use legislation alone to fix.

We already have laws for these things. If you steal IP your employer already has recourse, so why do they need to control your non work time in addition to the legal avenues already at their disposal?

We handle those through contract law to some extent. Any law passed to prevent employer overreach would presumably be neutering contract law in some manner. I'm not sure there won't be unintended consequences we'll have to deal with for a long time.

> why do they need to control your non work time in addition to the legal avenues already at their disposal?

They aren't controlling your non-work time, they're controlling your non-work output. You can use that work, they just don't want you selling or giving it away, as they view that as competing with what you've contracted to provide them exclusively (because you signed an exclusive contract).

Guess what this is disallowed by!

You can write "oh yeah by the way we're not going to pay you for ~75% of your working hours because we're cheap bastards" in the contract all you want, that doesn't make it legal. If they want you to work for them 168 hours a week, they need to pay for it.

People have been primed to assume some things about the statement presented (as with the root comment), but if you really examine it critically and rationally, you'll see it's not nearly as ludicrous as it sounds. Employers often put things in contracts that we take as obvious and most would agree should be allowed. At it's simplest level this is a non-compete agreement while that person is employed. Whether they are disallowed from offering their services to a competing company, or an open source project, IBM does not want them plying their skills elsewhere while they've contracted to ply them with IBM, and presumably as put that into the contract. Whether it's for an open source project or not is irrelevant, if that's what they agreed to in the contract (let's not act like an open source project can't provide competition, whether or not this one was).

I've outlined my thoughts on this in detail other places in this thread. I don't agree with contracts like this, and would attempt to not sign one if it was possible (but maybe if I was paid enough, it would be worthwhile). But I do think this is a case very easily handled by contract law, and better handled by it than some ham-fisted legislation that is easy to work around and has unintended consequences.

Presumably this works differently in your country, but I could 100% collect unemployment benefits were I to work less than 25 hours in any given week, regardless of whether or not I had an active employment contract.

> if you really examine it critically and rationally, you'll see it's not nearly as ludicrous as it sounds

It is exactly as ludicrous as it sounds. A company pays you to do 8 hours of work. You go there and do the 8 hours of work that they paid you to do. You then go home and do something else in your free time, and they phone you up and tell you to stop doing that because they don't like it.

This is not acceptable behaviour.

> At it's simplest level this is a non-compete agreement while that person is employed.

Despite being legal, non-compete agreements are equally scummy, and I'm not sure why you think that this comparison is favourable to IBM. It's also important to note that non-compete agreements are only enforceable if there's demonstrable harm to the business that employs you, or you're taking intellectual property from said business to use yourself. IBM very clearly has no intention to respect those limitations, so they can get bent.

I don't understand how anyone could possibly read the sentence 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' and think that it sounds okay. No matter how much nuance or context you want to add, any company policy that results in someone typing those words is a gross overreach.

That has nothing to do with that I said.

> You then go home and do something else in your free time, and they phone you up and tell you to stop doing that because they don't like it.

If you agreed not to do something in a contract, you shouldn't do it. There are obviously ways overreaches that should be protected from, but if someone comes to you and says here's a contract for $10,000, all you have to do is agree not to write any code for any companies or submit any code to open source projects and you sign that, should you be able to ignore that contract? If so, should you have to give the money back? In what way is this different than if it's an additional stipulation on your employment contract?

> Despite being legal, non-compete agreements are equally scummy, and I'm not sure why you think that this comparison is favourable to IBM.

Non-compete agreements for after your employment has ended are scummy. I see no problem with a company making your employment conditional on you not also working for a competitor at the same time, as long as that is clearly outlined up front.

> 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' and think that it sounds okay.

Because, contextually, what they are saying and is being left out is along the lines of "you agreed not to do this when we employed you. Stop doing this. It doesn't matter whether you use a work email or personal email to do this thing you agreed not to do, as long as you are employed by us. Stop now. If you don't stop, we'll fire you, and then you can do it all you want, but we won't be giving you the paycheck we agreed to, because part of that agreement was you would not do what you're doing now, because then you won't be employed by us."

I think that's an okay thing to request if the employee agreed to that stipulation in advance. I would try not to agree with anything like that, but if they offered enough money, I might. I don't think there's some fundamental right of mine to contribute to an open source project that should be prevented from being negotiated in a contract.

You either believe that someone should be able to offer you some amount of money for you to agree to behave a certain way by not doing some things, or you don't. If you think that shouldn't be allowed, then you disagree with a huge chunk of contract law. If you propose we change contract law at such a fundamental level, I suggest you also provide for how you don't collapse the economy at the same time.

If the clause is illegal, yeah. In almost every jurisdiction on the planet, a contract containing a clause that is illegal renders that clause invalid, and the rest of the contract stands. So why would I not collect my free $10,000 and continue doing whatever I wanted in my free time? Sucks for the company offering that contract, but maybe they should avoid trying to break the law next time my contract is up for negotiation.

> If you think that shouldn't be allowed, then you disagree with a huge chunk of contract law.

Correct. Fortunately I also agree with some parts of contract law. Specifically the parts that would make 'You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby".' an illegal thing to actually enforce.