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Others have already commented on how this isn't "standard" in places outside the US, so I'll focus on something else. Ted, you're a Big Deal. You maintain ext4

Others have already commented on how this isn't "standard" in places outside the US, so I'll focus on something else. Ted, you're a Big Deal. You maintain ext4, you're a major kernel contributor. Of course Google is going to keep you happy, give you plenty of time to work on FOSS, and provide you with resources for it. They are paying you to work on FOSS to a large extent. The deal is they give you all this time and resources, and you slap a Google copyright on it and don't care because it's all GPLed anyway, and since you're working on this stuff at work anyway, you throw everything into the same bucket and Google owns whatever commits you make at home too. This is entirely different from the average Google SWE/SRE, who may have a number of personal projects, and may contribute to random things, but nothing Google cares about much. Google doesn't give a damn if I stop contributing to FOSS. As an SRE, none of my work product at Google had anything to do with FOSS directly (except, like, one 20% project where I ported Linux to some vendor hardware). Google doesn't care if they force me to stop maintaining usbmuxd, which they effectively did by rejecting my IARC application (without answering my questions after it; e.g. they could've proposed going through releasing and Google copyright from then on, but they also didn't do that). For someone like me, going through all those processes, especially in the form they existed in back when I worked there >5 years ago, was all red tape for zero benefit. Google wasn't sponsoring any of my work. Google doesn't care if I have a commit in ALSA to fix 5.1 audio on a specific Acer laptop. Google doesn't care that I made FireWire not blow up on JMicron controllers on systems with an enabled IOMMU. Google doesn't care that Pulseaudio network discovery now works properly with link-local addresses. Google wasn't paying me to do any of those things. They are just things I did in my own time, as a FOSS user, not as a Google employee. And so, it is not reasonable for Google to own that work, that I do on my own time, that has nothing to do with my job, and to then require me to go through getting permission, and to then slap a Google copyright on all my code. Copyright assignment isn't free. I had to relicense a project from GPL to LGPL recently. It was a simple matter of asking the other 2 one-off contributors and changing the license. It would not have been a simple matter if Google had owned part of the code, which they would've had they not messed up my employment contract in my favor. Yes, other companies are worse (Apple). That doesn't mean Google gets a pass for being less-bad. It's still broken.

tytso 7y ago
marcan_42, I will have been at Google for 10 years in January, and even back then the Open Source policies were part of the Noogler training, and the fact that Google would own everything you did, even on your own time, was clearly in the stated in the employement document, as well as a place for you list everything that you had worked on before you started work at Google and so was your Intellectual Property (IP). Google's open source policies is now fully public (as of a few years ago), and I can affirm that they haven't changed substantially in the last ten years. It's all here[1], including the statement releasing code as open source under the Google copyright was very clearly documented in the IARC process[2]: [1] https://opensource.google/docs/ https://opensource.google/docs/ [2] https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ So I have trouble taking your complaint that "Google didn't tell me that I had an alternative" seriously. Also, from your description, a huge portion of your contributions that you listed were in the Linux and associated projects (such as Pulse Audio). So all of this would have required one, or perhaps two, requests to release OSS patches; once you have done that for one or two contributions, it's no longer necessary to ask permission for subsequent patches to a OSS project. (This is true for all Googlers.) Asking for permission to release those under GPL is trivial, and is granted as a matter of course. Lots of other Googlers have done it, without problem, and most have not complained the OSS releasing process is heavyweight. IARC is more heavyweight, yes, but it's right there in the IARC process documentation that the OSS releasing process is the preferred option, and that it is lightweight. Before I started working at VA Linux Systems or at IBM, I had taken the class, "Law for an I/T Manager" at the MIT Sloan School. So I was very well aware of IP law issues (patents, copyright, and trade secrets), and how to read contracts, including employment contracts. So none of this took my surprise (either at VA Linux Systems or at IBM, both of which had similar provisions in the employment contract); perhaps you didn't bother to take the time to read the employment contract and perhaps you didn't bother to read the very clear web pages at Google's Open Source Program Office. I can't speak to what you experienced at your Noogler training, so it's unclear whether you weren't paying attention, or it's since been streamlined. But if you found the IARC documentation so you could submitted the IARC request, you should have found rest, and this shouldn't have been a surprise to you.
- delroth 7y ago

tytso 7y ago

marcan_42, I will have been at Google for 10 years in January, and even back then the Open Source policies were part of the Noogler training, and the fact that Google would own everything you did, even on your own time, was clearly in the stated in the employement document, as well as a place for you list everything that you had worked on before you started work at Google and so was your Intellectual Property (IP). Google's open source policies is now fully public (as of a few years ago), and I can affirm that they haven't changed substantially in the last ten years. It's all here[1], including the statement releasing code as open source under the Google copyright was very clearly documented in the IARC process[2]: [1] https://opensource.google/docs/ https://opensource.google/docs/ [2] https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ So I have trouble taking your complaint that "Google didn't tell me that I had an alternative" seriously. Also, from your description, a huge portion of your contributions that you listed were in the Linux and associated projects (such as Pulse Audio). So all of this would have required one, or perhaps two, requests to release OSS patches; once you have done that for one or two contributions, it's no longer necessary to ask permission for subsequent patches to a OSS project. (This is true for all Googlers.) Asking for permission to release those under GPL is trivial, and is granted as a matter of course. Lots of other Googlers have done it, without problem, and most have not complained the OSS releasing process is heavyweight. IARC is more heavyweight, yes, but it's right there in the IARC process documentation that the OSS releasing process is the preferred option, and that it is lightweight. Before I started working at VA Linux Systems or at IBM, I had taken the class, "Law for an I/T Manager" at the MIT Sloan School. So I was very well aware of IP law issues (patents, copyright, and trade secrets), and how to read contracts, including employment contracts. So none of this took my surprise (either at VA Linux Systems or at IBM, both of which had similar provisions in the employment contract); perhaps you didn't bother to take the time to read the employment contract and perhaps you didn't bother to read the very clear web pages at Google's Open Source Program Office. I can't speak to what you experienced at your Noogler training, so it's unclear whether you weren't paying attention, or it's since been streamlined. But if you found the IARC documentation so you could submitted the IARC request, you should have found rest, and this shouldn't have been a surprise to you.

delroth 7y ago