@TymoteuszPaul It doesn't seem so. The project have between 5 and 10 maintainers doing most of the work, and Gust is a maintainer on each project. I see the same names pop up in a lot of projects though. I can't disclose the names of the projects without embarrassing the company, sadly.

So, in short, you screwed Gust working him way above his pay grade and he is now leaving. Now you want him to get you out of the dodo again after how you treated him? What do you think is the solution for how you behaved?

@SolarMike We disciplined (severely) the manager that let this drag on for 18 months rather than just 6, and offered a promotion plus one-off bonus to offset the 1 year of additional salary he would have earned as a "senior engineer II". The real screw-up (not mine) is why he was training people much more senior than him: it basically makes him feel he's 100% ready for 2 additional promotions immediately (there's more to the higher roles than just training/mentoring). I'm working with limited resources to correct the mess-up someone else created.

@Henre in your post you've said that his request for the 2 more promotions was fair and denied only because of optics, now you seem to say that he didn't deserve them. Which one is correct?

Anyone else remember reading this or oh so similar about 4 or 6 months ago?

@TymoteuszPaul I should correct that: Gust's self-appraisal seems fair, since he's been training people at higher levels. The level he needs to grow into though, requires additional soft skills he does not yet possess. However, since he can train others in much more senior technical roles, he's convinced he already possesses all the soft + technical skills needed. It was just plain silly to put him into this role in the first place.

@Henre I wouldn't dismiss his soft skill if he managed to rally people to do work for him for free. Maybe rough around the edges, but rallying people to do free work, and to then follow him from helping your company is not an easy feat (as you are now finding out).

@TymoteuszPaul No arguments from me on that point. There are additional soft skills he needs though, and the "rough edges" are a large part of the barrier he needs to overcome.

@Henre he doesn't as he quit and moved to greener pastures somewhere else.

In addition to my answer, the fact that you phrased it as "...unless they were instructed to act this way towards us" is pretty unsettling. Instruction? Even if Gust did what you suspect, it wouldn't be an instruction (suggestion is probably the word I'd use), and phrasing it that way kinda paints a picture of a view that this open source community is supposed to do you and your company's bidding.

Has anyone found a question that looks like it might be this situation from Gust's POV yet?

@shoover no, but I do feel like I’ve read something that sounds like that in the past couple of months.

What do you actually need from the maintainers? It is an open source project, you can make changes to the code as you wish.

@Helena We require features that can only be implemented by people with expertise (i.e. the maintainers). We can't fork the project for legal reasons I can't get into here.

@Henre Isn't it then just a matter of how much you have to pay for the task? Or are they refusing to work with you no matter what?

@Henre if you can use a repo, you can fork a repo, if you think that there are legal reasons stopping you from doing one but not the other then you are plainly wrong. So either you cannot use the repo at all, or you can fork it out. This topic starts to smell of troll to me.

@Helena If we go that route, we're inviting more expenses and legal woes (legal team's words, not mine).

@TymoteuszPaul This mandate came from our legal team. What they say is basically marching orders for us (i.e. anything GPL is treated with contempt; Apache/BSD is a "maybe" if we're lucky).

That attitude from your legal team is enough to sink your relationships with any maintainers if any hint of it reaches them. It is also counter productive when you are dependent on the projects with their existing licenses.

'anything GPL is treated with contempt; Apache/BSD is a "maybe" if we're lucky' That means the company's business model depends on distributing derivative works of open-source projects without revealing the source code of the company's modifications, right?

@Henre You mention that the reason Gust was not formally promoted was because he has the technical prowess but lacks "soft skills" necessary to the position. Well, now you've lost Gust. Which is more harmful to the company: Gust lacking "soft skills", or you losing Gust and all the associated connections/tools/expertise he brings with him? You may want to reconsider your position on "soft skills" over this incident...

Sadly, being a “Gust” myself in the past, there wouldn’t be anything that could be done, that would make me stay. The bridge was burned. I took my skills to another location, became an even better engineer, and tell my “war time stories” as a warning

Your best bet- write a check out to Gust. Add 0s until he smiles. You're well and truly screwed and its your own fault. Your better options were to either have given him the promotion AND the mentorship in the soft skills you think he needed, or to have given him the salary without the title while providing same mentorship with an expedited path. You're lucky he's even giving notice, I wouldn't have in his shoes.

@Henre "We require features that can only be implemented by people with expertise (i.e. the maintainers)." - are you paying the maintainers? Or were you relying on the fact that Gust was a maintainer already under your pay? Thats probably a large part of the issue here - you want the cosy relationship to continue, the maintainers might see your company as a freeloader, especially given your revelations about your legal teams stance on open source...

@SolarMike There was this question about an employee demanding various guarantees to not quit and there was the one where the employee threatened to make GPL code public (though that one was from 2019).

Explain to upper management that the open source projects can no longer work with your company directly due to "optics"

don't worry. it'll be fine. like you say: "it's just code, after all"

"I doubt such people would be so coarse to any newcomers engaging in the project unless they were instructed to act this way towards us" — sure. All other things being equal, internet communities are usually suuuuuper-friendly.

Your company burned bridges, refuses reparations, refuses to pay for new ones, and refuses to bring it in-house. Seems to me your problem is your company, not Gust.

Gust got disGUSTed.

Henre, what is your position in the company and in relation to Gust?

@BSMP Thank you for those links. They are being forward to the legal team. The first one is actually quite helpful.

@DanielHatton well if they use GPL code internally (tooling or the likes) without redistributing derived work, there is no issue license-wise. still, they would want to see new features in their tools.. so it seems plausible to me without suggesting that illegal stuff happens there

especially if the company is not first and foremost within the software industry, it might just be that the legal department does simply not grasp how stuff is used by those software engineers..

Show, this manager was very lucky tht his departing senior refused his demand to introduce the new replacements, and just answered with a very nuanced "go **** yourselves; introducing you to my buddies for my after-hours hobbies is not in my job description".

It would have been a super debacle if really followed the demand.

Now at least the projects are not harmed, and the new people have a small chance to make progress.