You have only one side of the story. Maybe the company doesn't have the rights on the code and cannot decide to open source it. Maybe they're making money with the code and open sourcing it is killing the business. Maybe they have a procedure before open sourcing code.

If tomorrow I wake up with a developer open sourcing part of the work he does for us I would sure be very unhappy.

You just can't condone that kind of initiative or in a couple of days your whole IP is on the Internet.

Either way, the jinn has left the bottle and is not going to come back.

Nick's words: It had been my final year university project I had been working on for a couple of months

Often that means that the university claims rights in the IP produced, certainly [way back] when I matriculated it was required of all students to sign a waiver giving rights to the Uni for any works created whilst being a student. The first I heard about it was at the matriculation table when I'd already gone up. Perhaps this sort of thing doesn't happen elsewhere or as been deemed inappropriate.

This is only true for graduate programs where the school is paying for your tuition via a research or teaching assistanceship. For undergraduates, who traditionally pay for their own tuition, or for graduate students under scholarship, they own all of their own work.

>For undergraduates, who traditionally pay for their own tuition, or for graduate students under scholarship, they own all of their own work.

This depends on what the work's being done for. If it's for a class or a credit giving research project, the university usually does own the IP in most cases.

However, if it's a side project that's not using any of the university's resources, the university shouldn't have any rights to it.

Where I have been (in the US), work done for a course is always owned by the person who is paying for the course, which in the case of an undergraduate paying their own tuition, is the student.

Basically, the person paying owns the work. If you pay, then you own it.

This wasn't the case at my school, as an undergrad.

My university owns anything you make while you are a student there. The example they used was something along the lines of: if you worked on it only in your dorm room and it had nothing to do with the university and received zero university funding, it was still theirs and you couldn't ever file a patent on it.

Your current university? Please do paste the relevant passages where this ownership is specified. Inquiring minds want to know!

There are several links to University IP policies here: http://www.adec.edu/user/ip-policies.html

Most of them exempt things made on your own time.

University of Kentucky claims rights to almost anything (even "drawings") students make while in any of "certain University units" (including the "Computing Center"): http://www.adec.edu/intellectualproperty/uky.html

It's not clear whether a dorm room is one of those "certain University units" or not. I don't think so, but it'd depend on the phrasing of the dorm room mission statement.

These policies are not trivial to sort out...

Ooh, my new favorite is North Carolina A&T State University:

"We don't have any such policies in place at this time. The university has initiated a faculty interest group which meets regularly to discuss these issues and similiar DL opportunities. Some interesting things are coming out these discussions."

http://www.adec.edu/intellectualproperty/ncat.html

that doesn't really work.

That isn't/wasn't the case at either of my undergrad or graduate institutions – in fact, at my graduate program, the official policy on student work is that it is ours and if a team project, we all had non-exclusive rights to the work.

Just a small anecdotal datapoint.

It does happen in most US universities, but it's not something you normally ask about.

True, but "my final year university project" has many different possible explanations, and it is analogous to one of the iPad developer saying that "my project is the iPad" but doesn't mean that the IP belongs to the iPad developer.

Yes, that is part of one side of the story. But as mentioned, we don't know the whole story.

If Nick's University has a claim on the code, then the company probably don't have the right to use the library themselves.

If the University decided to assert their IP rights they could either demand a licence fee or the removal of the library from any of the company's products.

From the OP

'Sadly though, due to concerns from my employer regarding intellectual property and similarities in projects I've worked on, I've been asked to take down the site.'

We have no way of assessing the validity of these concerns from what has been said. If the company feels the open source project contains work they have funded, and don't want to release, then it is their right to ask him to withdraw it.

Also, unless Nick is primarily driven by open source participation there's nothing to say they will eventually lose him.

People aren't arguing that it's illegal or incorrect for them to take it down, or that they don't have the authority here. They are arguing that it's a stupid move.

Nobody argued that it is not their right. Of course it is, or Nick would have left it up at Github. It's their right, but it's not "right".

I think it's more of a grey area than that. Certainly I can imagine a situation where the overlap was insignificant and this was an overreach by the employer, but there is currently no evidence to suggest that.

One could also say that in this case, Nick should have discussed this with the employer. It seems as if he was aware he should have, and by not doing so, the situation is no worse off than it would have been.

It's also possible that they (he and his employer) performed the "related work" on commission and have signed over IP rights to a client. In this case, open sourcing the work would expose them to liability from the client.

Was he also asked by his employer to take down his "final year university project" that this was supposed to be? That sounds a little bit incongruous to me. Or was the "final year university project" also somehow related to his job output preceding in the creation of said final year project?

The IP of my final year (UK) university project belongs to the University not me, and not to the company that was sponsoring me for my final year.

Are you sure? I employ PhD students to work on commercial products and there is a strict rule in the university that any work done by the student is owned by the student. We are granted an irrevocable, fully transferable licence to use their work, but the student is not locked out from doing whatever they like with the stuff that they did. I'd be surprised if that was not the same for undergraduates - although I am aware that university boards are becoming very greedy with respect to I.P.

In North America, that is an atypical arrangement. Here in Canada, Waterloo is unique for being one of the few (only?) schools that doesn't claim IP ownership. My university (Manitoba) does, although it is negotiable and for commercially sponsored projects the sponsoring company generally owns the IP.

EDIT: From personal experience, I can also tell you that IP policies are less clear at the undergraduate level around here.

In California it is more complicated. First there is copyright law -- students and academic personal manual employees own their copyright. The Education code limits how public university students may share notes (a matter of conduct, not copyright). Non-academic personal manual appointments have copyright owned by the university. Students who are not also otherwise employed by the University would own their patents (subject to any details of their non-university employment agreement). Anyone employed by the university (student, academic or staff) get to keep a cut of their patents; but have to share it with the university.

I was pretty sure this policy of students/academics own their own copyright but share in patents was the standard in United States higher education.

Correct--where I said "IP" above, I should really have said "patents/patent rights". Copyright, to my understanding, becomes more of an issue when publishing, as some (most?) journals are greedy in that regard, but I haven't had to cross that bridge yet.

What you're describing sounds pretty similar to the way it works here, but the gross majority of full-time graduate students in engineering are employed by their universities (as "research assistants" or similar) and thus effectively waive their patent rights.

(FWIW, I think it's great for schools to share in patents which originate within them, but I would like to see students and staff be more well-informed on the subject, and commercialisation efforts which span beyond a single industry--I know of very few schools which have accomplished that.)

That just shows how ridiculous the laws in UK/US are. Around here, what you're describing would be expressly against the law.

It would be helpful if you were more specific than just "Around here".

.cz

I think it's about the same thing in Sweden (the student has the rights).

At the sime time, there are two different rights; copyright and "usage right" (not sure if that last thing is translated correctly), which means that you own the stuff you've created, but you can transfer the right of using it to someone else.

Even if you are a fully paid scholar at univ? I mean not even a penny in scholarship at an institution? I don't think it will be such an umbrella rule. Is it?

Seppuku is a method of expressing extreme regret: apology, protest, and similar things. What I'd agree that Nick's employers are acting in an extremely foolish manner, it doesn't sound like they regret anything.

Reality check: the HN echo chamber isn't the world, not even the programming world. This is a totally minor matter that most people (even most programmers, even most programmers in the startup scene) will never hear about and forget quickly if they do.

Someone found the company further down; linking to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5400190

EDIT: Many people have pointed that its not the correct company.

EDIT2: http://www.expert-24.com/ seems to be the correct company, and seems more plausible to have IP problem with chart.js (don't got lynch them, seriously!)

Radweb is not the employer in question, according to his Twitter feed. He no longer works there.

tweet in question https://twitter.com/_nnnick/status/313983245987479552

Doewn't work there anymore it seems, as in that's not the company in question (see linked-to cmt)

Well i guess the company does fit the profile, they even have a "patented expert system platform". Patents.. argh.

They have already lost Nick. It's just matter of time now.

They may be a very good employer.

This may have been uncomfortably close to his closed-source day-job.

Without details we don't know.

And eventually everyone moves on. Company loyalty is dead.

Loyalty is reciprocal. I've never understood why companies expect complete loyalty while simultaneously showing none in return. I also think that it's very unlikely they are 'good employers'. They may pay well, but that's a totally different thing to being a good employer.

If (and this is hypothetical, obviously) the guy open sourced something uncomfortably close to one of their products and uncomfortably close to what he does for his day job, I don't think this is unreasonable.

I am a huge fan of Open Source, but not every company is, and I don't think it makes them a bad employer to have acted this way, given these supposed preconditions. You're correct that pay is only part of the equation, loyalty and respect are also very important. This action doesn't necessarily mean that these things are lacking.

It may well do of course, the world is full of assholes :)

I've worked at many companies who claim to "support" FOSS, without ever contributing. What that really means is that they support getting free software. Take + no give = parasite, end of story.

My old job used their "Open software initiative" as a feel-good marketing pitch. Translated, it means "We charge you to install stuff we got for free." All of our clients couldn't tell the difference and their one experience with FOSS is paying money to get a (bad) install.

I don't know what's worse, the abuse of the spirit of FOSS or the bad taste left in our client's mouths.

plus it's javascript for christ's sake? the best they can do is obfuscate it.

To the people who make decisions like this, it's all 1s and 0s. I mean literally there will probably be some policy pertaining to "software", or some manager freaked about "software" being released. No-one will stop to care about the deployment model when making this call.

Obfuscation is more than enough to protect the code. You need only to make the cost of ripping it off greater than or equal to the cost of creating it. IP is so much more than the code. It's the concepts, the graphics, everything.

I don't think so at all,even without trying to reverse it you can inspect the DOM and debug the event flow etc. I think "construction is more difficult than verification" is a good adage for engineering. JS/CSS is transmitted in the clear and it should move towards open source, plus it's not hugely valuable. Now, if this guy was doing projects at work to do charting and then he decides to open source that on his own? Not cool, you need to make your personal projects clear to your employers to avoid this nonsense. That being said if it was just charts and it was my company and he managed to get press on it... I'd probably give him a bit of a lecture about it and then probably a raise and continue it as open source.

I wasn't advocating for the company to use obfuscation. It's largely irrelevant in this regard. I was replying to the comment above mine which was left by someone who seems to think that obfuscated code is somehow less secure than compiled code.

I agree -- if I was the boss in this situation the open source thing would be allowed to continue.

Where does Nick even work? The only people they alienate is someone who has enough time to cyberstalking him to find out...

Agree that its lame though.