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From: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Cc: Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org>
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Umair Shahid <umair.shahid@gmail.com>
Cc: Greg Sabino Mullane <htamfids@gmail.com>
Cc: Cornelia Biacsics <cornelia.biacsics@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-advocacy@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Non-Compete Challenges for Community Work
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2026 16:22:14 +0100
Message-ID: <CABUevExB7UY9LRDM7BUNUM9uPN+GL+afgNEEU20CMZPgatw3ag@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <aV_KTpkxEmhD5btz@momjian.us>
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	<aVV2tqTab7FCFu2U@momjian.us>
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	<aV_KTpkxEmhD5btz@momjian.us>

On Thu, 8 Jan 2026 at 16:16, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.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@momjian.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


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