if you are in the NYC area, you are advised to come to this month's local perl meetup. tilly plans on being in attendance.

he seems to be doing well and is still writing lots of Perl. if you want to know more than that, you'll have to come to new york and ask him yourself.

anders pearson

The situation described in Professional Employees and Works for Hire is very common, particularly in the United States. It should be expected, you sign a contract, they own you. What's not usually expected is for the employer to be a complete ass about it. These types of moves show a deeply embedded ignorance within a company's management. I personally have lost all respect for his employer, and will definately not do any business with them until they rectify this type of behaviour.

What's worse about this is how it was just swept away and forgot about. Silence is evil. tilly contributed a lot to Perl and to the Open Source community, and where are we when one of our own needs us? Nowhere to be seen. We just go about our business. In my opinion that's beyond sad. Anyway, back to the norm...

What's not usually expected is for the employer to be a complete ass about it.

If you review the record carefully, you'll find little-to-no direct evidence of tilly's employer being an ass. They merely reminded him of the agreement that they had put forward, and which he had signed. What followed here was a lot of enflamed speculation and uninformed accusation.

This is not evil silence. tilly made a choice. Let's respect that choice and hopes that he one day makes another choice that allows him to return.

In the meantime, his experience is a lesson to read and negotiate before you sign.

Sorry, I don't buy it. Maybe I'm a little biased based on past events, but any company that "reminds" someone like that is asking for it. They should have a very clear, flexible policy that claims rights to only work done on company time and/or with company resources. Under no circumstance should the company claim rights to all work done by an employee. It creates a very hostile environment, and is also a very, very stupid business move as it will drive away a great number of highly skilled potential employees.

Even if they convinced an employee to sign such a contract, they should have the common sense to allow them to continue work on projects that are:

1. Not closely related to work being done at the company
2. Not using company resources and
3. Especially not when they provide no financial benefit to the company.

Having employees write modules for CPAN and helping out other programmers in their spare time should be greatly encouraged. Would you rather your programmers just sat at home and played video games? Contributing to Open Source projects is a great way for employees to further develop their skills and improve your company's public image, all at no cost to you. Discouraging employees from doing so results in a very negative situation where everyone loses.

This is a prime example of a very ignorant company shooting itself in the foot. I hope they take steps to patch it up soon.