Pardon my anonymity, but it's necessesary for this post. In some ways it should have been posted to SOPW or possibly to PM Discussion, but there's really not a lot anyone can do but throw away sympathy votes on an anonymous post.

I have to be careful what I say as I discovered that all of my posts here are part of a file my employer is keeping on me. Now I'm not completely against employers monitoring employee activity while on the job; I understand it to some extent. But when all of my online activity no matter where it originates from is collected and analyzed for "Intellectual Property" violations I feel obliged to give a warning shout.

Now the reason for this 'collection' is what will upset most of you. It is because I advocate Open Source. When I was hired my employer seemed to endlessly inquire what and how I aquired and maintained such a wide understanding of technology from networking to OS's to hardware and programming without any formal education. I spent the first year and a half showing how I gained my skills through the many net resources, and became the 'Open Source' poster boy for the Corp.

Then this year something changed. Open Source has become a bad word and I can't get near any of the 'interesting' pieces of any projects. The ostrisizm (I'm too bummed out to fix spelling errors) is palpable. Finally today someone from outside my department had me go for a ride with him at lunch. He described a high level meeting where it was literally decided that Open Source was a threat to the Corps intellectual property, and that even internal user groups need extra security monitoring, and that the internal culture needed to reflect this level of security.

What is truley ironic is the real reason I am/was/have been an Open Source advocate was because it allowed me to grow in this profession without having to resort to stealing software -- my ethics just are not comfortable with that (Hell I've even registered winzip).

And they think I'm a threat!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: McCarthyism, Open Source & PM
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Sep 18, 2001 at 07:01 UTC
    Perhaps your employer would be more comfortable if I sent an itemized bill for any work-related questions which I've helped to answer for you.

    I'd be happy to donate my moderate fees to the monastery.

    Send me a private message if they're willing to go for this.

[reply]
Re: McCarthyism, Open Source & PM
by lemming (Priest) on Sep 18, 2001 at 10:17 UTC

    Bleh. Especially the part where the company is keeping track of your online activity.
    I'm still annoyed at one company that I had worked for. This company used a lot of open source, but since it was modified, they didn't release anything back. Rather than rant over what I went through, I can only offer you a bit of advice. Run like hell. If the company is steadfastly refusing the benefits of Open Source, and this makes you unhappy, it's not a good enviroment for you. Stress is bad. And if the company has identified you as an Open Source advocate, there will be people who will increase your stress.

    Here's some links to previous somewhat related discussions:

  • Licensing and Rape-Proofing your ideals.
  • At what point is the coding more yours?
  • Non-Disclosure Legal Fun w/ my ex-Employer

[reply]
Re: McCarthyism, Open Source & PM
by blakem (Monsignor) on Sep 18, 2001 at 03:53 UTC
    Ouch, thats awful. I was in an environment where new management deemed Open Source "non-IPOable", which is why we spent several years revenue on a proprietary content management system. (guess how much that helped our IPO...) I'd recommend either leaving, or bringing in an OSS speaker, such as ESR*. I gave my manager a copy of the CaTB but it didn't seem to help much, since he wasn't the one making the decisions.

    Other than fighting it, you can always toss your resume up on monster and find a better environment.

    * yeah, I've got problems with his recent wishy-washyness, but he's supposedly good at explaining the virtues of Open Source to business.

    -Blake

[reply]
Re (tilly) 1: McCarthyism, Open Source & PM
by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 18, 2001 at 23:18 UTC
    That message sounds like recycled Microsoft advertising. If you wanted to go out on a limb, you might say that like this: "Open source is not an intellectual property risk. Period. That is the conclusion of companies from Sun to IBM who have looked at it. The one exception is Microsoft who launched a PR campaign saying that it was. This is a classic FUD attack on their part, nothing more and nothing less." If not, then a more toned down version of the same would make sense. (But definitely point out that companies such as IBM who have investigated this closely concluded that there was no intellectual property threat.)

    I would also suggest bringing up the worm that is circulating today and pointing out the inherent and large dangers involved in trusting Microsoft software. Point out the security risk to your intellectual property that the SirCam virus represented. Raise the infrastructure costs of relying on Microsoft software, and ask what their ulterior motive is for trying to scare people off of using free products with better security.

    And finally I would suggest a direct challenge. Ask them to explain exactly how they see a challenge to their intellectual property to arise. FUD unsupported by facts, as this one is, generally doesn't survive the light of day too well. So raise the issue directly. Ask for examples of companies who have found their intellectual property rights threatened. Point out how Perl's Artistic License and Apache's BSD-based license bend over backwards to avoid creating an intellectual property issue. Explain that as long as you don't cut and paste code from GPLed products or include GPLed components, the GPL cannot "infect" your code-base.

    Getting the message through may take work because of your different roles in the hierarchy. But the facts are on your side...

    UPDATE
    How topical. Eben Moglen, counsel for the FSF, has an article on exactly how they enforce the GPL. It is worth a read, and it may sooth some unwarranted fears...

[reply]
Re: McCarthyism, Open Source & PM
by da (Friar) on Sep 18, 2001 at 18:45 UTC
    "... it was literally decided that Open Source was a threat to the Corps intellectual property, and that even internal user groups need extra security monitoring, and that the internal culture needed to reflect this level of security."

    This sounds terrible. If the net effect is that they consider you personally to be a threat to the company, your only options are to defuse the threat (convince upper management they're wrong, or convince them you've changed your mind about Open Source) or jump ship ASAP. It would also be a good idea to consult with an IP lawyer, to allow you to extricate yourself without a lawsuit and to continue being able to work in the same field in the future. Tread lightly. 

    $_='daniel@coder.com 519-575-3733  /Prescient Code Solutions/  coder.c
+om
';s/-/ /g;s/([.@])/ $1/g;@y=(42*1476312054+7*3,14120504e4,-42*330261-3
+3,
42*5436+3,42*2886+10,42*434987+5);s/(.)/ord(uc($1))/ge;for(@x=split/32
+/;
@y; map{print chr} split /(..)/, shift(@x) + shift(@y)) {perlmonk.da.r
+u}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: McCarthyism, Open Source & PM
by perrin (Chancellor) on Sep 18, 2001 at 21:41 UTC
    Maybe you should point out some open source success stories. Yahoo is built on open source tools. So is Amazon. eToys was mod_perl and Linux (the business model failed, not the technology). Ticketmaster and CitySearch are heavy open source users, and so is Morgan Stanley. There are many more examples like this. The important thing is to understand that using open source tools (and contributing to their development) does not mean you have to make all (or any) of your company's IP public.
[reply]
Re: McCarthyism, Open Source & PM
by dga (Hermit) on Sep 19, 2001 at 01:39 UTC

    My employer, seeing the power of the Open Source tools I have used and volume of usable code I have written with it are starting to consider Open alternatives to their long standing use of Proprietary software.

    I was the only one using Open Source stuff here when I started. There are places where this pendulum is swinging the other way.

    Good Luck.

[reply]
      Same here--when I started at my current place of employment two years ago, my coworkers had barely heard of linux. I set up a box with a pathetic PI/266 and started scripting some of the more painful steps in our workflow. That caught some attention. Now we have a compute cluster with 20 dual cpu linux boxes.

      Scott

[reply]

Back to Meditations