Posting scripts to Github that utilise my employers API

Danger781

Hey folks,


I have a "best practice" question of sorts. I work for a company that has a customer-facing scripting API so that customers can automate certain actions, or otherwise implement additional functionality which is not available via a normal workflow. I quite enjoy writing little snippets that utilise this API to assist customers with tackling certain issues, or to offer "ease of life" improvements. I would like to start posting these on Github on my personal account so that I can:

1. Share these scripts easily with other customers. Often they are a once-off script to tackle a specific issues but others are scripts that a number of customers may benefit from.
2. Demonstrate my abilities and the level of initiative undertaken to work on these projects. Right now if a potential employer were to come knocking I have almost nothing to show for my time spent in this company (Even though I have no intention of leaving any time in the near future).

However I have some concerns about this.. As an employee of said company I'm not sure if there is a legal concern about sharing links to personal Github scripts when interacting with customers, when some of these customers could probably be pushed towards purchasing consulting hours to assist with developing their own personal scripts. Other than that I assume a "This is not an official product etc." paragraph on the repository would be enough to cover any liability?

There's also the issue of "work product".. If I'm writing the script on my work laptop am I even allowed to open source it on Github without sign off from Legal?

We have an official company GitHub Organisation account so I could just get added to the organisation, which is fine for some of my scripts that are polished enough and actually solve something useful; But the other one-off scripts are not worth enough to be posted there for all customers, but they may still fix a one-off issue again.

I am also concerned about how it would look on my profile when I have 0 repositories myself but I'm just contributing to organisational repositories? What happens if I leave the company?

colm_c

I would talk to your manager, your scripts should be on a developer website/portal, which references examples on github.

smacl

Danger781 wrote: »

There's also the issue of "work product".. If I'm writing the script on my work laptop am I even allowed to open source it on Github without sign off from Legal?

Depends very much on your employment contract, but I would guess anything you develop during working hours is not your intellectual property and hence not yours to share unless you've explicit permission to do so. Similarly, you may need explicit permission to use a work laptop for personal purposes, so anything developed out of hours on that laptop might be compromised. My advice would be if you're planning on contributing to open source, make sure all development is done on your own computer in your own time and does not 'borrow' any code from your work. Some companies might be fine with it, others not at all.