Re: Non-Compete Challenges for Community Work

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.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Do not let urgent matters crowd out time for investment in the future.