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@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.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        https://momjian.us
  EDB                                      https://enterprisedb.com

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