In that case Google's policy is what is restricting you, not the license. The AGPL doesn't say you can't contribute if you work for Google. I'm sure AGPL users (like the company in TFA) wouldn't mind if Google reversed their policy and gave their employees permission to contribute.
In this context, I don't think the distinction matters.
If I was choosing ingredients for a brownie to sell, using THC would restrict which US residents can buy my brownies. Is it the fault of the lawmakers in my customer's state? Or is it my fault for choosing an ingredient that's banned in most US states? If I'm trying to maximize sales, the question of blame is irrelevant.
From a practical standpoint, it doesn't matter whose "fault" it is that a Googler can't contribute to an AGPL project. Choosing an AGPL or similar license prevents me from receiving contributions from people who otherwise might be interested in contributing.
But from my perspective, I'm fed up enough with Google's anti-AGPL FUD that I don't mind not getting contributions from Googlers for a while. It's gotten worse than Microsoft in the nineties.
And with critical mass, Google will hopefully make a similar turn. Microsoft is now the world's largest open source contributor by some metrics. I don't know if I buy those metrics, but it's big. Same thing will happen to Google, hopefully.
Unquestionably, yes. They know exactly what kind of business they were looking to restrict with those laws, and in your analogy they stuck all the fallout from that on you. (That's not to say one shouldn't be civic-minded, but for the record I tend to avoid analogies when talking about this because they more often seem to confuse the issue than actually explain what is happening)
AGPL and the non-commercial licenses are still banned.
Edit: The Google OSS contribution guidelines are actually public, if anyone wants to take a look: https://opensource.google/docs/patching/
E: Oh it's the latter, this is pretty gross. A noncompete sure but what is this..
> As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google.
Disgusting amount of control over people's lives. Y'all need a union.
The above link [1] is for the automatic process where Google still owns the copyright (hence no AGPL or non-Commercial stuff). This works for 99% of stuff and is easy.
There's a second process called IARC [2] which lets the employee retain the copyright. It's not automatic but allows for AGPL, non-commercial, or proprietary contributions.
We also have a few AGPL projects that were whitelisted due to COVID-19 [3].
[1]: https://opensource.google/docs/patching/ [2]: https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ [3]: https://opensource.google/docs/patching/#no-review
I wonder who Google considers to be in bad standing while also not fired. Flight risks? Maybe people who want to work on side projects?
Still pretty greasy
FWIW this is more Google being risk adverse than Google being evil. If a Google employee in their free time contributes to an AGPL project, that employee needs to open source all IP related to their contribution to the project. Depending on the specifics and how the AGPL is interpreted in court, Google could be forced to open source their internal IP.
FWIW, I believe all large companies take a similar stance on the AGPL.
This isn't the problem. The reason for contribution bans is stated in [1]:
"Our general philosophy is that we do not allow patches to projects that Google cannot use."
Absolutely false. This is simply not how copyright works!
How so? Here's what section 5 of the AGPL says[0]:
> You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
> c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
As for patents which is covered in section 11:
> If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients.
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)
Why? Because this isn't about IP risk, it's about trying to kill the AGPL.
That employee doesn't even own the copyright to Google's code. If Google itself violates the license you can go after them, that's when it becomes a problem for them.
Things like the AGPL and CC-BY-NC-* are actually written by lawyers and make it clear what you actually want.
That's kinda a sad state of affairs that you're allowing corporate policy (of companies that you don't work for) to effectively dictate your licensing strategy. Not saying you're wrong to do so (it's your project; you know best), but the overall gist of it feels a little dystopian.
Ultimately Google is applying pressure -- even if unintentionally -- to the community at large: "use a license we're happy with, or you'll have a smaller pool of contributors"[0].
If AGPL was a majority license for projects like these, then Google would likely have no choice but to allow contributions to AGPL projects.
[0] Note that that's different from an individual deciding (for whatever reason) that they don't want to contribute to projects that use certain licenses (which is fine!). Google's policy forces an unreasonable restriction on their employees that their employees may not agree with, but can't argue with because of the employer-employee power imbalance.
Out of personal self-interest, I want to maximize the number of people who are eligible to contribute to my project. If it's unlikely for anyone to use my code to compete against me or form a different business without compensating me, I default to a permissive license because it allows more people to contribute.
This is not the case. The AGPL license does not exclude googlers. It's Google that excludes googlers.
This is entirely google's decision. It's obviously not a decision made to help FLOSS or FLOSS developers.
> Out of personal self-interest, I want to maximize the number of people who are eligible to contribute to my project.
I don't want to maximize the number of organizations taking my software, locking it down, renaming it and ultimately competing AGAINST my user community.
Personally however I would not spend to much energy and time worrying about that. I don't expect google to pay programmers to support my side projects, and I would be actually a bit worry if they contributed to anything critical at the place where i work. Google might find coexistence acceptable today, but if they have paid employees to work on code for a competing company (even if its just for one of their commercial products) then I would see a risk that one day they would prefer to own what they are today giving out for free.
I would love an update to moonlighting laws that acknowledged megacorps.
Have we made contributing to all allowed project/licenses more efficient over the years? For sure :-) Maybe that's what you noticed. We switched to asychronous permissions for 99%+ of all patches.
I think we have a mirroring system setup to automatically publish any internal changes.
Edit: See https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#reciproc... for the public info about mirroring.
Since Amazon is frequently lumped in with Google et al., I think there is common belief that they are roughly the same. Amazon has an Outside Activity policy that covers some employees (certainly all tech employees). For the vast majority of outside work activity that triggers the policy, you simply fill out a notification form that logs an affirmation that the activity does not trigger further review.
The license of open-source software that you want to contribute to on your own time is not part of the policy that would trigger further review. In other words, so long as developing that software is permitted by the outside activity policy, you are free to develop and make software available under AGPL on your own time while being an Amazon employee.
Ultimately overtime is paid, but the first 45 hours every month are ‘included’ in the salary.
A good reading that covers this very topic really well: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
Joel Spolsky has a good article explaining the rationale:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
>Suppose, now, you have a little game company. Instead of making software, you knock out three or four clever games every few months. You can’t invent all the games yourself. So you go out and hire a game designer to invent games. You are going to pay the game designer $6,000 a month to invent new games. Those games will be clever and novel. They are patentable. It is important to you, as a company, to own the patents on the games.
>Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty.
>Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.
Presumably the employer wouldn't be happy if the designer simply had a bunch of nice design ideas and kept it in his or her head.
Instead, the designer should at some point write those ideas down and hand them over as a design document to the rest of the company. That process can provably happen during work hours, and the contents of the design document should be subject to the employment contract - since that's what the employer is paying for.
The document could, for example, have a boilerplate legal heading with "I declare all the contents herein are the sole IP of $company" or some such. Or the contract could specify that any document produced during work hours should satisfy such requirements. That would seem a safer legal protection than simply asserting the right to what the designer came up with on the previous day.
After all, if the concern is that the employee could have invented the game in the evening and then submitted it during the day - well, he or she could just as easily have invented it before their employment began and submitted it afterwards, no?
Personally, I use it as a gauge of trustworthiness of employers; I am more than understanding that if I come up with a great idea related to something I'm working on, it's probably a result of the experience I've had AT that employer and it makes sense that they have some claim to that.
However, when employers say that ANY idea I have is theirs, that's usually a bad sign.
Personally, I consider that a feature rather than a bug. There's a list of these licenses [1] and I make sure my software uses one of those on the list.
[1] https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#banned
A nonviolent, voluntary and intentional abstention from dealing with google, in order to encourage google to alter an objectionable behavior.
1) Excluding Googlers, which isn't very nice.
2) Applying pressure to de-evil Google, which is very nice and benefits everyone.
I'd like to have a non-evil Google again. I really miss the old non-evil, brilliant Google. Organizations change.
Let’s have them do work as individuals instead of Google employees.
When I worked at Google (2014-2018), it was easy to get permission to contribute to open source projects as long as the license was BSD, MIT, or Apache 2.0. The more restrictive licenses like GPL 2 or AGPL, I think Google either flat out denied or you had to do a lot more work to get permission.
Now that I work for myself, I much prefer not having to ask anyone for permission to contribute to open source, but I generally default to MIT/Apache2 unless I have a reason to do otherwise, out of consideration for employees at Google or other corps who may want to participate in my project.