Re: Non-Compete Challenges for Community Work

On Thu, 8 Jan 2026 at 16:16, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 04:14:08PM +0100, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> > On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 at 19:47, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 31, 2025 at 02:17:10PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > I don't know if things are improving and we can ignore the issue,
> or if
> > > there is some action that can be taken. Ideas are:
> > >
> > > * New employees should read employment contracts and ideally have
> them
> > > reviewed by an employment lawyer. It might be difficult, but
> not
> > > being able to find a suitable job for a year is clearly worse.
> > >
> > > * Somehow incentivize companies to limit their non-compete
> restrictions
> > > to be more limited, and hopefully not block community
> involvement.
> >
> > I think a question is whether it is wise for the community to be
> > influencing how companies specify compete restrictions in their
> > employment contracts. Even if the community were successful in
> making
> > changes that are positive for employees, is this an overreach for the
> > community?
> >
> > An idea would be to allow companies to voluntarily submit their
> > non-compete clauses to the community for approval to be listed on
> some
> > community fair-employment page. Would any company do that?
> >
> > Regardless of whether the companies would, I think that's a really bad
> idea. It
> > would amount to us giving what would potentially be seen as legal advice
> in
> > basically all different jurisdictions around the world. We should
> definitely
> > not get into that.
> >
> > Having some generic recommendations for either not having non-compete
> clauses
> > or explicitly excluding OSS contributions from it is reasonable, but we
> don't
> > want to review any actual texts IMNSHO.
>
> I was thinking we would allow them to be posted publicly, rather than us
> reviewing them, though it seems even less likely they would do this.
>

Oh, just like a list of them basically? "If you go to work for <x> here's
what it might look like" but with no judging or comments from the community?

Yeah, I think that's very unlikely that companies will be interested in
that. And even if they are, I bet they wouldn't update them as their
templates change anyway...

//Magnus