[PLUG] Open source and professional employees

[David Mandel]

                                                 21 March 2002

    Some companies can be very sticky about doing Open Source work.
Even universities and government agencies sometimes have doubts
about it.  This was especially true before the internet made
Open Source work so easy and Linux became popular enough to
make Open Source work "respectable".  Indeed, I often feel
my addiction to Open Source work has limited my choice of
employers; but I'm happy with the choices I have made.

    I started writing, collecting, and redistributing source
code and significant data sets in the 1970s as an employee of
Oregon State University.  The university generally supported
this activity, but once in a while they would take the position
that while collecting software and data for the university's
needs was important; redistributing this to other institutions
was irrelevant to my department's research and thus a waste of
time and money.  Fortunately, this attitude was rare.  The
university generally supported me very well, and never asked me
to sign any excessively restrictive agreements.

    In 1986 a government contractor by the name of Infotec
Development hired me to work on a contract with the
U.S. Bureau of Land Management.  I was hired in part, because
of my huge library of "Open Source" software for Prime Computers.
My relationship with both Infotec and BLM was a bit strange.
For the most part, Infotec was a defense contractor and they
took pride in keeping everything as secret as possible.
However, since I was working on a contract with a civilian
agency and I had been hired as an academic I was given a lot
of freedom.  Actually this wasn't Infotec's idea.  BLM liked
my work and encouraged Infotec to keep me happy.

    When I first went to work for Infotec their employment
agreements weren't very restrictive.  Eventually, after several
mergers they asked everyone to sign a new highly restrictive
(and possibly illegal*) employment agreement.  I refused until
I added an appendix which negated much of the agreement.
Infotec was extremely unhappy, but there wasn't much they
could do.  I mean they didn't want to tell BLM they had fired
me over that issue.  Of course, I couldn't have gotten away
with this if I were a new employee.

    During these years, I had one other bad argument with
Infotec.  I contributed to a software package called LTPlus,
<http://www.ltplus.org> which was written by government employees
and contractors and was thus in the public domain.  At one point,
Infotec hired all the key programmers on this project and tryed
to make the package proprietary.  At that time, I was asked
(or told) to find and destroy every copy of the source
code I could find.  I'm generally a team player, but I
considered that to be illegal and immoral; so I got the
last public edition of the source code and emailed it to
various interested parties.  I never told anyone about
this until recently, but people suspected that I had
done something and wanted my head.

    Meanwhile, BLM treated me very well during all
these years.  They didn't generally understand or support
Open Source Software; but they appreciated good results and
gave me a lot of freedom and political support.  In some
ways, I was their one and only Open Source programmer, but
they treated me well.

    I left Infotec in Jan 1999 and currently work for
Micro Sharp Technology where the employment agreement is
simple and non-restrictive.  Fortunately, Micro Sharp
supports an Open Source philosophy, but then that is
why they hired me - to start their Netule <http://Netule.org>
product line.

                                          Sincerely,
                                          David Mandel
                                          Chief Activist
                                          Portland Linux/Unix Group
                                          1440 NE 59th
                                          Portland, Oregon 97213
                                          dmandel at pdxLinux.org
                                          (360) 260-2066 at work
                                          (541) 730-5285 cell

   *  Employment contracts are generally legal, altho they are often
      difficult to enforce in court.  The particular contract I was
      asked to sign was poorly worded and had clauses which may have
      been illegal.  In fact, my superiors argued that I should sign
      it, because no court would ever enforce such a screwy contract.
      I didn't buy that argument.
   ======================================================================
   David Mandel, Product Manager       http://www.MicroSharp.com
                          Other Affiliations
   David Mandel                        http://www.DavidMandel.com
   Portland Linux/Unix Group           http://pdxLinux.org
   LinuxFund                           http://LinuxFund.org
   LTPlus                              http://LTPlus.org
   ======================================================================