[d503]

It looks like that's true, "except for those inventions that ... Relate 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."

With a company like Google it would seem that quite a lot of things might fall into that category.

[ajross]

True enough. But that's still a far cry from "all your codes are belong to us, get in line for the committee". I suspect this is an instance of policy getting ahead of legality. It makes sense for Google to want to review employee open source work (and they could even do things like fire people who don't honor the process). But if it was represented to him that he needed approval to legally release code, then I think someone lied to him.

[DannyBee]

Nobody represented that to him.

Let me quote what I wrote in the thread we had on hackernews on this exact subject of spencer leaving yesterday (with the same title, no less :P), then let me explain something additional

First, a quote

"First, this is not the normal open sourcing process. He says "This uncertainty bothered me a lot, since I wasn't sure whether my project could be legally released as open source.". The normal open sourcing process takes about 3-7 days. If he really wanted certainty about releasing it as open source, he could have gone through that process and been done with it. The process he is talking about is the process of Google granting ownership of various IP rights that google would normally own, to the employee. For various reasons (ethics, patents, copyright, etc) this is more complicated, and takes longer. Google is one of the few large companies that even lets you do this, AFAIK. The humorous part of all this is that the page describing the process, states quite clearly it will take about 2 months to make a decision. So it's not like the 2 month wait was unexpected, either, and phrasing it like he does implies that there was some amount of uncertainty in the time period where he was being strung along, which is simply not the case."

In addition to the above, let me add that at least in the case that took two months, Spencer wasn't asking the committee about open sourcing. He asked "If possible, I would like to own all IP (though Google can use it too, just not patent it) and possibly not release the results of this research to the open source community."

This is the one that took 2 months to decide about. He had said "this is probably not related to what Google is doing", and I explicitly warned him the day he applied that what he wanted to get a release for was in an area google did care about, and was doing research in.

[jmillikin]

  > The humorous part of all this is that the page describing
  > the process, states quite clearly it will take about 2
  > months to make a decision.

I'm not on the corporate network right now, but if I remember correctly, the page actually says that the wait will be up a month and usually shorter. Two months would definitely be unexpected.

Also, there seems to be something mildly broken somewhere in the process. After I submitted my project, I waited a month with no word before contacting cdibona privately -- he told me that my project had already been approved. A month after that, I received an approval email. So even if the process is fast from your perspective, it may seem very slow from the perspective of the applicant.

[DannyBee]

So the page now says a month, you are correct and I am now apparently wrong :P.

I have edited to state that if you don't hear from us, to please ping us. It doesn't change the fact that in spencer's case, he had a method for certainty, and it would have taken far less time. Getting approval for special things (what he asked for is something that the committee explicitly, in bold, on the page, says it does not generally do.) does take more time.

It's also not like we meet in some secret star chamber-esque fashion (those meetings are not monthly). He could have checked my calendar to see when the next meeting was :).

Your case is a bit weird, from what I see. Your project was approved, but the notification date is wrong. I imagine cdibona broke the script that sends out emails, and didn't notice/run it again until the next meeting, so you ended up with a month late notification. As I said, I edited the page to make it clear folks should ping us instead of wallowing in silence.