My personal experience: I submitted two personal projects http://kartofel.jfedor.org/ http://kartofel.jfedor.org/ and https://market.android.com/details?id=org.

My personal experience: I submitted two personal projects http://kartofel.jfedor.org/ http://kartofel.jfedor.org/ and https://market.android.com/details?id=org.jfedor.frozenbubble https://market.android.com/details?id=org.jfedor.frozenbubbl... last year (in July I believe) and both were rejected (i.e., the committee said that Google would not release copyright). However, recently (a month or two ago) I was told that the rules changed and now they were happy to release the copyright for both. In the meantime I tried to get my employment agreement altered to state that my personal projects belong to me, not to Google, but I found there was absolutely no room for negotiation there (despite the fact that my manager, an eng director, supported this). I was told by the legal department that the only person in the company who could approve such thing was Larry Page. It is true that Google has a very easy process to open-source your projects. One practical pain is that if you want to accept patches you have to get every contributor to sign Google's CLA.