Re: Non-Compete Challenges for Community Work

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.

//Magnus