| First of all "that employee needs to open source all IP related to their contribution to the project" is false. The contribution of a chunk of code to an external project is just that. Anything else that belongs to google that you called "related" is not automatically subject to AGPL. Second, in your example you are not describing where (if) any license violation happened. Third, GPL cannot force an author to release something under threat of being arrested or something. In case of GPL license violation, the worst thing that can happen is the termination of the license, which means that google can freely choose between not using that software, or using the original version, or using any modified version that is AGPL compliant, either developed internally or externally. The terms of license violation are incredibly lenient compared to closed software/movies/music piracy. (And yet we hear all this FUD around *GPL while nobody screams at the risk of a google employee using some a picture of some celebrity in a meme in a weekend project) |