A note to Bumble, this makes me not want to work for you or anyone who is currently in a related leadership position at Bumble (ie: eng leadership, etc.). Given the lack of supply in engineering the bad publicity is going to cost you more than any miniscule gain.
edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.
This is such a hilariously way to shoot yourself in the foot. Software engineers that work on open source in their free time are almost always extremely talented, and will definitely look at this news and never consider joining this company. Bumble just got added to the same list as Amazon of companies I will just simply not even apply to when searching for a job.
edit: looks like there is more to this story than the tweets are suggesting. If this wasn't obvious, don't build projects that are derived from work you are being paid to do and don't do them on the company laptop.
>edit: looks like there is more to this story than the tweets are suggesting. If this wasn't obvious, don't build projects that are derived from work you are being paid to do and don't do them on the company laptop.
My point is that this is petty rather than if they can legally do this. They didn't ask for the repos to be taken down, and the projects the repos are inspired by are open source already by Baboo from what I can tell. I've found that companies which are petty about one thing will be petty about other things so are not good places to work.
> but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty
After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. It says so in the README.md. They were also written while the author was employed by Badoo/Bumble.
I don't think this is as clear-cut in favor of the developer as the comments would suggest.
> After reading more closely, it appears both repos are derivative works of pojects that Bumble (aka Badoo) owns. It says so in the README.md.
That is how Open Source is supposed to work, I don't understand why everyone is thinking that this is some kind of huge discovery. Since both the MVICore and MVIKotlin repos are Apache 2.0, Badoo could simply pull in any improvements from MVIKotlin in if they wanted. They could ask their ex-employee if there was any interest in Badoo officially maintaining the project.
There are about ten other paths I could suggest that go with how OSS projects can and should work. None of them involve sending legal notices to your former employees to "transfer" the repos.
All I'm seeing here is that some person at Badoo/Bumble with little knowledge of how OSS works and a lot of lawyer time to throw around has made this move, and lost them a lot of goodwill from potential future employees.
i dont know if you can claim this - OSS is not supposed to be unsanctioned derivative works of commercial software that is private. The company _could_ make it OSS, but an employee cannot, since they do not actually own the rights to make this decision.
Perhaps Bumble was a bit heavy handed, but from the point of view of the law, they are acting within their rights to demand ownership transfer, or removal etc.
The question seems to be whether it is allowed to create what is effectively a competitor framework (on your own volition and without authorization from your employer, as in the case of MVIKotlin vs MVICore) under your own name (brand), potentially in your free time, but based on designs of an open-source framework managed/developed/maintained by your employer in employees' time.
And even if it is allowed, can your employer claim ownership on the basis that your work is derived from employer/company work.
However, I think this is unprecedented (I can't think of any similar cases regarding reclamation of IP), and we'd have to be actual lawyers to know the answer. I'm curious to see where this case will go.
You can, as long as what you are working on was already by management internally. Otherwise... you're right. Would only bring problems if/when someone is set on making your life hard.
Why would it be a problem if they were related to his day job? Keep in mind the libraries he was inspired by are open-source apache licensed code. Your argument only makes sense if you assume the code was related to proprietary tech and not just a piece of code you find on the internet.
That only works if he wrote them during work hours. If he didn't then why would the company own it? Anything you do off the clock is none of the company's business.
Generally the company has a claim to closely-related work even if done off-hours. You can't e.g. clone your company's product off-hours, or even make a closely-related product without the companty having a valid claim on that IP.
This is correct, MVIKotlin is based on Badoo's MVICore, and Decompose is a mix of Badoo's RIBs (and zsoltk's Compose-Router which is also transitively a Badoo-owned codebase).
The Badoo/Bumble code was Apache 2 published on Github, and the code in question is also Apache 2 published on Github. So I have no idea what your point is.
How was the approval given for that license to be used? Did the company sign it over and then retroactively renege? Did they just notice that a core developer was their employee at an overlapping time?
Huh? The company made their code open source under a permissive license. A developer working there then built their own package inspired by that code on their own time. I'm not sure where ethically the issue is here. Many things are legal but not ethical. So while they may legally be able to compel him that doesn't mean their action isn't unethical and petty. Companies that do unethical and petty things tend to be horrible places to work eventually.
I think you jumped the gun trying to predict how this conversation would go
I am asking exclusively about the legal circumstance
And also stop acting confused at every response, this is a normal conversation where someone asks about the context and the other person replies with the answer, I skimmed the tweet thread but the background isn't familiar to me and thats what the point of the conversation is
You are too tuned to expecting an adversarial comment to defend, when thats not the case at all
Your first response made multiple strong claims and tried to state what my stance was with an explicit example. If you didn't know the context then you shouldn't have started with strong claims you didn't know the truth of. In addition, my original post made no claim of the legality of this situation and neither did you make any claims until this post. I merely claimed that this was a petty thing to do.
Trying to twist out of statements you made yourself and trying to play the victim when not winning an argument doesn't make for a useful conversation.
edit: And I don't even publish OSS anymore but if you're willing to go after an employee for something this petty what else would you go after them for.