Hector Martin

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.