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Comment by thesmallestcat | Hacker News Reader

You've misunderstood my comment. I'm saying that Google has a reputation for claiming rights to just about anything you present to them. It's that petty IP policy that has this fun little project under their ownership. For many people, particularly those involved in open source, Google's reluctance to let go of employees' side projects is a strong reason to not work there.

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It is part of the fine print in the job contract for developers and is pretty common in most companies. You don't create a side project while being employed there without the company claiming ownership of it. It is part of a safety net for the companies so that they don't take a loss by an employee claiming copyright of code they wrote for the company during work hours.

According to law if there is no such clause the developer may claim ownership of code he wrote even if he was employed. The contract protects the company from that but also applies to any code written by employees generally (not a nice thing but prevalent).

It's very, very common that if you send an email to the relevant people, they'll sign off on whatever so long as it's not relevant to the business. They don't really want to retain control over your random side-projects.

Google, on the other hand, seems to believe that absolutely everything its employees ever do is relevant to its business.

They explicitly don't "retain control" (beyond insisting that it's published in their name). It's Apache 2 licensed.

Indeed, the main dev has forked it into his private Github account: https://github.com/echeran/clojure-turtle

Google has IARC (https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/), which is a formal process of sending email to the relevant people, and results in a much better legal position than "Bob said it was ok".

Indeed they do - the issue being that according to a handful of Googlers I know, it's surprisingly difficult to get anything through that process.

That's really strange, since we've approved >96% of requests, and except for when someone is on vacation, it's usually within 3 days now.

Given how many reply to the approval emails that they found it fast and happy, i definitely find this surprising.

In any case, you are welcome to have those employees reach out to me, i'd love to understand their experience what went wrong.

Also, not obvious that this is even a side project. The repo has four contributors. Could well be an internal Clojure training thing or something.

You claim it's petty policy, but it's more like an intersection of employment laws and being a public company, with a sprinkle of unfortunate past events.

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