It's the default at Google, but if you want to have an open source project or even a side business you can. You have to disclose it first and get sign-off. This seems reasonable to me and avoids any grey areas.
Alphabet has subsidiaries that work in medicine and autonomous vehicles. You sure your side project isn't competing with the company? You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?
> You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?
Here is your mistake. The reality is, that they arent going to do that, the vast majority of the time.
The only time when it maybe might happen, is in far out there situations, such as, for example, when that self-driving car guy, built his own multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of stolen google documents.
And even then google only went after this guy, after he sold the company to Uber. Before that, google was perfectly fine with the guy running his mult-hundred million dollar company.
Are you going to create a multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of literal stolen documents? No? then you almost certainly don't have to worry about it. Nobody is coming after you.
Sadly that's not the case in NY, where I live. I've tried calling my representatives to see if they can propose it for a national law, but I suspect COVID has put this on the backburner.
Is this for anything at all? What if, hypothetically, I want to try out some concepts in angular material to learn? Would I need sign off just to put that in a public gitlab repo (because I get free uncapped CI minutes if it is public). At some point the code should be obvious and silly, right? I mean I’m not doing anything novel here, just learning stuff. It has no commercial value.
You can do whatever you want if it has no commercial value. Google would not bother asserting their rights because your experiments will not grow into a competitor they would care about.
This is for serious side ventures, like you creating a self driving car company on the side. Use common sense, fault on the side of disclosure, and you'll be alright.
you still have to get approval. But the approval is pretty rubber-stampy - my buddy applied for "tasking rtos in rust", which was accepted, despite that being incredibly general.
The other side is that "if it is so trivial, why upload it?".
The reason they have this progress is that google does so many things that almost anything could be considered competing with Google.