Hector Martin

Although Google may *legally* be able to claim practically anything you do under some "we have a related product" technicality, in *practice* their lawyers aren't going to go after you for pet projects or random commits. It's not safe, but it's *probably* okay.

It seems Google largely catered to employees that contribute to specific projects repeatedly, and not people like me who just send random one-off patches. I'm good at fixing problems in unknown code, I don't go work on a single codebase for long periods of time.

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.