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Comment by martius | Hacker News Reader

The author has a @google.com email address.

I'm neither confirming nor denying this theory since I have no idea, but googlers can and do work on stuff that has nothing to do with their job function, even aside from formal 20% projects.

Also, I don't know if it's commonplace anymore, but I remember in the past a lot of people that worked on Chrome had @chromium.org addresses, too.

I feel like if it was unrelated to their official work they wouldn't use a google.com address?

No, we use our @google.com address for anything that might fall under the copyright assignment rules of our employment agreement. I won't debate whether those rules are actually enforceable - I have no idea - but if you're actually curious, the documentation is mostly public.

https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/

I see, thanks!

No, the policy is to use your google.com address, with some exceptions[1]. This confuses a lot of people, as things done for fun by one person on weekends (maybe not even official 20% time) are mixed in with official projects.

[1]: https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/

Is this for patches that occur on your own time without company resources? Even in jurisdictions (like CA) where they can't enforce ownership over what you did?

I am neither a Googler nor a laywer, but I think yes and yes - if you don't care about copyright ownership and only licensing (which most of the time is fine - you usually only care if you either want to commercialize it later or you want to make sure either you have standing to sue infringers or Google doesn't), there's an easy process for open-sourcing something and letting Google retain ownership, and a much more involved process for confirming that Google doesn't own it. So it's easier to let Google claim copyright and not argue about whether they really have had ownership.

Some relevant links are https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/ for the personal-project-with-Google-copyright flow and https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ for the personal-copyright flow.

That doesn't tell you much - it's not unrelated to their official work, it's just not related to company priorities. If it's a project you work on at / for work, copyright is likely still owned by the employer. See also the number of personal projects that are not official Google projects at https://github.com/google .

Sure, still could be personal interest. I certainly commit things to my employer's source control that are personally interesting and not company strategic priorities (but still correct changes to make) on occasion.

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