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Just contributing behind the scenes (like many Googlers) was all well and good, until the subject came up in an internal mailing list and I made the mistake of mentioning a Pulseaudio commit as an example of the kind of thing too trivial to bother going through the Process.
This is the 9-line patch: https://github.com/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/4e5051db7297d8171d148ef7d15c2e06ebeff0ce … This was something I debugged for a few hours, then fixed at 2AM. At home. I just wanted to send it and forget about it. No way I was going to spend more of my time getting a release for a 9-line patch to a GPL/LGPL codebase.
I guess they've realized this was a dumb policy, because under the current rules what I did was totally fine.
Unfortunately, at the time, instead, what I got was a flamewar with @cdibona where he accused me of putting both Google and Pulseaudio in jeopardy. For a 9-line bugfix.
This proceeded with a bit of back and forth where I mentioned my bad experience with IARC. DiBona was having none of it, so instead he opted to *ban me from the IARC & open sourcing processes*. I was told to "go through employment legal" for any further issues.
It was at this point that I pulled up my Google employee contract, and looked *very* carefully at the IP ownership clause. As it turns out, I had missed a little detail. It was *obviously* modeled after CA labor code (even though I was in Ireland), but there was a difference.
CA labor code says, in pseudolegalese: You own THING you do on your own time without company equipment IF NOT ( THING relates to the company's business OR THING results from work you did for the company )
Since Google's business is basically everything technology, you do not own anything in practice. E.g. I was told that since Android has an audio server too, that the Pulseaudio patch was in scope and owned by Google.
However, my contract was worded differently: You own THING you do on your own time without company equipment IF ( NOT THING relates to the company's business OR NOT THING results from work you did for the company )
It is evident Google would do better to hire computer science graduates for lawyers, because whoever wrote that clearly didn't understand boolean logic and De Morgan's laws. This is wrong: ¬(𝑃 ∨ 𝑄) ⇎ (¬𝑃) ∨ (¬𝑄) The correct equivalence is: ¬(𝑃 ∨ 𝑄) ⇔ (¬𝑃) ∧ (¬𝑄)
And so, *as long as* whatever I did in my spare time and without using Google resources did not result from work I did for Google, it didn't matter one bit whether it "related to Google's business", which is the loophole they use to own everything you do.
And so I resolved to give zero shits from that point on about their IP ownership policies, and did whatever I wanted in my spare time. If you work for Google (Ireland especially) you should check your employment contract carefully. You might be able to do the same.
I hope Google's employees are able to unionize and this is one of the changes they should demand. No company should be able to own things you do in your spare time, especially if they don't relate at all to your job description (regardless of whether they do to someone else's).
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