3 ms·
If you're in the US, Google claims that they own it (even in California, where local law means they can only do so if it "Relate[s] at the time of conception or
by mjg59 5y ago
If you're in the US, Google claims that they own it (even in California, where local law means they can only do so if it "Relate[s] 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" - they asserted ownership of a Linux driver I wrote on my own time for hardware produced by a company that went out of business before Google even existed).
Google's actually better than many though - there's a process to release your code under an open source license (although with Google's copyright), you can contribute patches to third party open source projects without additional permission (again, under Google's copyright), and you can request that Google assign copyright for a personal project back to you. My understanding is that Apple basically forbid all of this outright. I'm not sure what the situation is at Amazon or Netflix.
- why_only_15 5y agotwo years ago at an apple all hands someone asked craig federighi about this and he more or less said "i know you all hate this {we get a lot of questions about this issue}... but for legal reasons we're not going to change it."
- tylerhou 5y agoThere is also an IARC process that grants you the copyright if you get approval. https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/
- OJFord 5y agoWhat does it mean to contribute to third party OSS (that has whatever X licence) under Google's copyright? That the project owners couldn't change licence (and keep that code) without Google's consent? Is this why some (/all of a certain size or commerce) worry about CLAs?
- mjg59 5y agoGoogle remains the copyright holder of the submitted patch. There's nothing special in this from the project's perspective - in the absence of copyright assignment as a required part of patch submission, the default is that the submitter retains copyright. In this case, it's just Google claiming ownership of their employee's patch rather than the employee holding the copyright.