Your employment agreement or contract likely has some clause saying you transfer ownership, rights, etc to the organization.
Which likely means your "free time" code you decided to do to make your job easier now belongs to your employer since they asked you to write it (albeit indirectly in this situation).
Will anything come of it for trivial stuff? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it's ok.
Unless you have something in writing saying otherwise, best not to mix stuff like this because one day you might wind up on the wrong side of an army of lawyers.
> Which likely means your "free time" code you decided to do to make your job easier now belongs to your employer since they asked you to write it (albeit indirectly in this situation).
Especially when you have problem A at work, then some time later write "generic code" that solves problem A, then some time later "import" the code to your dayjob to solve problem A. And double so if nobody else ever uses this generic code and you never use it for anything else.
As an industry we talk a lot about flexibility, particularly in scheduling and when we do our work, but you can't have it both ways. You can't be doing laundry and mowing the lawn and going grocery shopping in the middle of the work day because it helps you think or it helps your programming process, but then make the argument that because you wrote this code at 6 PM on a Sunday it's yours and not your employers, when you committed it to your employer's git repo Monday morning. Not with a straight face, at least.
I want to be clear, I'm all about getting shit done during the day. If I need to get a haircut at 2:30 PM, I will. But I'm also not pretending that my employer's code is mine or that I have any right to publish it.
Ethically, I'm not sure how to slice it. I'm operating on what you wrote here rather than this specific story.
Some contracts stipulate that anything you write while employed is owned by your employer. (I'm settled in that this is unethical, but it's reasonable to comply.)
But let's suppose there's no such stipulation.
You get an idea while at work. Everyone gets ideas. You take your brain home with you (I hope) and start developing that idea. You think it's generally useful and doesn't depend on any or reveal anything about a trade secret or other proprietary work, nor reveal anything about them.
Is it your choice to contribute that idea to your employer or to use it in an open source or some other unassociated project? Why or why not?
Is it OK if you never use it for any of your employer's projects?
If not, then is it OK to wait until after your employment to develop that idea on your own or for your next employer or even turn it into your really awesome startup that definitely won't fail? (I think all of you are willing to do the first, and most of you the second.) Why does that change the ethical quandary, or why doesn't it?
Alright, so your employer specifically asked for this solution and you wrote one on the clock but it was minimal, maybe you didn't have enough time to make a more elaborated one, and you write a better one and did one of the above with it. Is that OK?
I don't think this question is all that cut and dried.
There would be a difference between you publishing your code to a public repository, under a permissive license and then allowing your company to fork the codebase and do whatever with it. Under this situation, the author retains copyright, and the company has the option to decline use of the licensed code.
That is different than solving common business problems at home, then when asked to solve them at work just copy/pasting those solutions and assuming you retain rights. Contributing that to your employer under that situation is no different than just working on salary - and you have not given the employer the option of rejecting those contributions.
See, that requires some argument of who it's for. Legally, copyright is established the moment something is created. (Hope you have proof.) I don't think you'd be able to claim _damages_ by sneaking your copyrighted code into the company repository, but other than that, I really have no idea how this would play out in court. It seems very risky but it's not obvious. I'd be interested in reading about cases in this middle area, if there have been any.
But anyway, I focused mostly on ethics. The specific situation you describe is ethically dubious, I agree, but I'm interested in where the line is and it's just not as clear as some are suggesting.
Copyright law is its own can of worms and is not the same as what's ethical. But, it does govern risk and practicality.
It's hard for me to imagine how you could lose rights via copy pasting the code. Making a new release with a new license doesn't invalidate the rights you already had.
Publishing code sounds like a way to prove it already existed, and nothing more.
It's not cut and dried but precisely because of that it is not a situation you should create lightly.
I think there's nothing wrong if you have a brilliant idea that happens to be useful to your employer to make some agreement that you work on it in your own time and grant the employer the use of the code. But you can't just do this unilaterally, and if you do don't expect the employer to take your side.
Just as you should have the right to decide what copyright to sell and what not the employer should have the right to assume they own the copyright to the code they paid for, unless stipulated otherwise.
Which likely means your "free time" code you decided to do to make your job easier now belongs to your employer since they asked you to write it (albeit indirectly in this situation).
Will anything come of it for trivial stuff? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it's ok.
Unless you have something in writing saying otherwise, best not to mix stuff like this because one day you might wind up on the wrong side of an army of lawyers.