This bit seems wrong (about private open source projects):
> Technically, Google owns everything you write while you work there, even if it's on your own time and with your own equipment.
Google is a California employer, and that's directly counter to California law as I understand it. The only exceptions made are for product areas directly related to your work (not just the employer's business interests). Am I wrong about this?
Googler here (though not a lawyer and I don't speak for the company). I agree that the OP's assessment that you quoted is incorrect in general, for the reasons you mentioned. The Google-internal process that OP is alluding to allows an employee to seek positive assurance from Google that the company will not attempt to claim ownership over the project. It's a way to get agreement up-front that both parties agree the project is unrelated to the business. You don't give up any rights by not going through the process, but you might discover later that Google believes the work is related to the business, and believes that it owns the IP.
However, there is another completely separate process that allows you to open-source your code while having Google retain copyright. It's much easier to get through (turnaround is just a few days) and lets you release the code under a permissive license like BSD or Apache2. I write a lot of open-source code on the side, and I've used this process to get approval for all of it. It makes no difference to me whether Google technically owns the copyright.
I would add that Google's open-source policies are a huge plus in my book. It's a night-and-day difference from Amazon where I used to work. Trying to get anything released as open-source at Amazon was like pulling teeth.
Thanks for putting this up here :-) (I handle both processes) The copyright process usually takes around 6 weeks, but new open source projects can be released in days (and patches much faster)
The open source thing I can understand. The part for non-open-source projects is hard for me as an outsider.
I can't see how any employee can have a web-oriented side project that doesn't compete with some Google service. You have a social network, a blogging platform, photo sharing, video sharing, online music, PAAS, code hosting, etc., etc. What area are you not in?
To this outsider, your question sounds like exactly the reason Google needs this sort of process. Even if an employee were working in an area that was theoretically competitive with something, an official determination by Google should trump theoretical arguments - providing valuable certainty to both sides.
We have a small group from code of conduct/conflicts, open source, android and folks who represent a few other strategic groups at Google and we simply requests one by one. Most of the time it isn't a problem and we grant the request. Getting everyone together regularly can be a bit more difficult, that's why it takes longer.
As a lawyer (IP, not employment), i can affirmatively state you are wrong about this, for reasons various folks mentioned below (the actual phrasing deals with relating to your company's business, not directly related to your work).
Additionally, court interpretations of this statute are not as favorable as engineers like to believe (IMHO).
Living in !California, from what I see, California is only theoretically different from most states. In practice, for technology companies, the law basically means your employer owns stuff on your free time, in the general case.
(IE If you were working for a startup that does online home rentals, and you were making a video game, you may have an argument)
Surely those court interpretations are situations where employees left to pursue products though, right? Is there really case law where a company sued to recover ownership of a free software project? That just seems lose-lose all around. Bad PR, bad karma, no deep pockets to sue, no damages to recover.
Personally, I find this kind of bureaucratic nonsense infuriating. And I guess I thought Google was better about it, but it doesn't seem to be. My past employers have, for the most part, simply shrugged when told about open source work I've done. Honestly I have to think that if I really ran afoul of a rule like this I'd just call your bluff and see if you'd fire me over it (because as I mentioned, we both know you won't sue).
What companies do you know that even offers this type of process? Most companies you have 2 options. Ask and be told "no you can't" or don't ask don't tell and pray you don't get sued.
How is Google having an official policy to get clarity a bad thing here?
Everywhere I've ever worked has been perfectly fine with my open source contributions, and never asked for a copyright assignment (to be fair, nor have they offered one: this is the kind of thing DannyBee finds untidy and unsafe). This madness is an affliction of large companies, and in particular their legal departments. And, given the small sample size I have of "large tech companies", Google isn't much better than the norm here.
Basically, demanding copyright assignment in exchange for "simple appropval process" seems like a poor bargain to me. It's not at all unreasonable to expect that employees be allowed to keep their own IP, and to argue otherwise is IMHO dangerous to open source.
There is plenty of caselaw I can find where, for example, employees have not left, but refused to sign over patents on stuff done in spare time, and companies sued to recover them while the employee was still working there. I have yet to find one where the company lost.
For open source work, if you go through the process, it's short and we're happy to approve it (patches take about 30 minutes, projects, 3-7 days). In the IP release process, it's longer. That is better than every company i have worked at.
You seem to think it's not very important, and just nonsense in general.
Knowing who the legal copyright owners of the source code in your open source project are is quite important (in the cases you posit where everyone is just saying "whatever", the owner is unclear) If you don't think so, I can tell you in the one important case in the US where an open source project had to defend itself, Jacobsen v. Katzer, that Victoria Hall (the lawyer) spent a very large amount of her time trying to get all this sorted after the fact, and it is only by luck that the 50+ contributors she had to wrangle were still around and accessible.
This is probably 300k in legal fees that could have been saved by having done the right thing up front at a cost of about 30 minutes. Note that these legal fees were paid by the poor guy who was running the open source project, not by his contributors.
If you want me to be blunt, no offense, I've met folks like you, who think all this is a waste of time, and you are generally not worth the eventual expense in legal fees to the open source projects you contribute to (IE when the open source project needs to actually defend its rights, or the company behind the OSS project gets sued). Shrugging and saying "whatever" also has a funny way of turning into "that was really mine and guess what, we want damages" when the company you worked for gets bought.
It's great to want the world to be different. I support all efforts to make life better for engineers around owning stuff in their spare time. I also spend a lot of my life trying to help open source in general.
But to be blunt some more: The world we live in right now is not a happy pretty place. The reality is if folks like me, and the companies we work for, tell you than when you release a new open source project we probably own, that you should spend 5 minutes filling out a 4 field form and waiting a day for some folks to click approve before you fly and be free, it's not because we are power tripping bureaucrats. It's because we're trying to save millions in legal fees when it matters, and make sure the open source project you want to release is not going to be in a bad place, at a cost of 5 minutes of time and a small amount of waiting.
So my advice is if you think you really want to "call someone's bluff", I would instead think hard about whether you are really expert enough in this stuff to be able to say it's all nonsense, and stop to think about whether the people who are perpetuating "nonsense" may actually have your best interests at heart. That is, trying to save you from yourself. If you really think it's a great idea to have an awesome open source project used by 1 million people, when it's not clear who actually owns the code, then all i can say is that i pity those people.
You're projecting pretty badly here, and are flaming where I really don't think it's appropriate ("People like you", indeed).
For clarity, though, when you say "the open source process", you mean the process where Google gets assigned ownership. An employee who wants to release something under an OSD compatible license without assigning copyright (for whatever reason, say because they want to use the GPLv3 and you don't, or because they simply don't trust a public company) does not simply fill out a 4-line form and get an answer in a day, as I understand it.
(edit: And you continue to euphemize this. It's not "special treatment", it's a flat out copyright assignment. Ownership isn't completely clear, so one of the parties needs to give up stake. And the process is clearly asymmetric in Google's favor. That's not surprising, really, but what is surprising is that you won't come straight out and say this.)
And my advice to you is that you consider the costs of this sort of thing to the employees and the engineering work when making your conservative legal pronouncements. As we've seen in the news today, even Google's rigorous IP process isn't enough to keep you from getting sued. The world is indeed not a happy pretty place; cavalier avoidance of process may not help things, but neither does paranoia.
1. I'm perfectly comfortable with what I wrote. I neither believe it was inappropriately flaming given what you wrote, nor do I think it is "projecting pretty badly", as you say (The "people like you" was intentional, and given the evidence I have, seems correct. If it turned out not to be correct, i'd happily retract it).
2. Yes, people who want special treatment take time. We've made the common case fast, and the exceptional case possible.
3. We do consider the costs, and try to keep the process as simple as possible while still accomplishing its goals. Note that I am an engineer as well as a lawyer, and contribute to a large number of open source projects and so I have to go through the same process everyone else does.
4. You honestly don't know what you are talking about when it comes to things you've "seen in the news", and i'll just leave it at that.
> There is plenty of caselaw I can find where, for example, employees have not left, but refused to sign over patents on stuff done in spare time, and companies sued to recover them while the employee was still working there. I have yet to find one where the company lost.
Is it possible to sum up briefly why this is? It seems to me that there are three kinds of spare time projects:
1. Spare time projects where the employer has no legitimate moral[1] claim of ownership.
2. Spare time projects where the legitimate moral owner is ambiguous.
3. "Spare time" projects where the legitimate owner is clearly the employer.
If employers only ever bother to sue in cases 2 or 3 I'm not sure there is a problem. Especially if there are internal procedures engineers can use to secure ownership of software in category 2.
Are companies routinely winning in case 1? If so this is a flaw in the legal system and should be fixed.
[1] Based on current generally accepted ideas about ownership. If a developer spends his nights working on a personal project with no connection to the employer, a reasonable person would attribute ownership of his work to the developer, not the employer who pays him during the day.
When you work for Google (who does everything) and you do anything computer related in your free time, I guess that then, Google owns it. In fact, many non-computer related stuff would probably also be owned by Google since they also do a bit of that.
However, these things can have subtleties introduced by the courts, so anybody reading this should talk with a good lawyer before betting a lot on this point.
It looks like that's true, "except for those inventions that ... Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer."
With a company like Google it would seem that quite a lot of things might fall into that category.
True enough. But that's still a far cry from "all your codes are belong to us, get in line for the committee". I suspect this is an instance of policy getting ahead of legality. It makes sense for Google to want to review employee open source work (and they could even do things like fire people who don't honor the process). But if it was represented to him that he needed approval to legally release code, then I think someone lied to him.
Let me quote what I wrote in the thread we had on hackernews on this exact subject of spencer leaving yesterday (with the same title, no less :P), then let me explain something additional
First, a quote
"First, this is not the normal open sourcing process. He says "This uncertainty bothered me a lot, since I wasn't sure whether my project could be legally released as open source.". The normal open sourcing process takes about 3-7 days. If he really wanted certainty about releasing it as open source, he could have gone through that process and been done with it.
The process he is talking about is the process of Google granting ownership of various IP rights that google would normally own, to the employee. For various reasons (ethics, patents, copyright, etc) this is more complicated, and takes longer. Google is one of the few large companies that even lets you do this, AFAIK. The humorous part of all this is that the page describing the process, states quite clearly it will take about 2 months to make a decision. So it's not like the 2 month wait was unexpected, either, and phrasing it like he does implies that there was some amount of uncertainty in the time period where he was being strung along, which is simply not the case."
In addition to the above, let me add that at least in the case that took two months, Spencer wasn't asking the committee about open sourcing. He asked "If possible, I would like to own all IP (though Google can use it too, just not patent it) and possibly not release the results of this research to the open source community."
This is the one that took 2 months to decide about. He had said "this is probably not related to what Google is doing", and I explicitly warned him the day he applied that what he wanted to get a release for was in an area google did care about, and was doing research in.
> The humorous part of all this is that the page describing
> the process, states quite clearly it will take about 2
> months to make a decision.
I'm not on the corporate network right now, but if I remember correctly, the page actually says that the wait will be up a month and usually shorter. Two months would definitely be unexpected.
Also, there seems to be something mildly broken somewhere in the process. After I submitted my project, I waited a month with no word before contacting cdibona privately -- he told me that my project had already been approved. A month after that, I received an approval email. So even if the process is fast from your perspective, it may seem very slow from the perspective of the applicant.
So the page now says a month, you are correct and I am now apparently wrong :P.
I have edited to state that if you don't hear from us, to please ping us. It doesn't change the fact that in spencer's case, he had a method for certainty, and it would have taken far less time. Getting approval for special things (what he asked for is something that the committee explicitly, in bold, on the page, says it does not generally do.) does take more time.
It's also not like we meet in some secret star chamber-esque fashion (those meetings are not monthly). He could have checked my calendar to see when the next meeting was :).
Your case is a bit weird, from what I see. Your project was approved, but the notification date is wrong.
I imagine cdibona broke the script that sends out emails, and didn't notice/run it again until the next meeting, so you ended up with a month late notification. As I said, I edited the page to make it clear folks should ping us instead of wallowing in silence.
> Technically, Google owns everything you write while you work there, even if it's on your own time and with your own equipment.
Google is a California employer, and that's directly counter to California law as I understand it. The only exceptions made are for product areas directly related to your work (not just the employer's business interests). Am I wrong about this?