> any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable
I highly doubt that this is true, at least in the US. Can you cite case law?
You can write a contract granting ownership of all the songs a musician performs, or all the books a writer writes during a specified time period. Why shouldn't the same be true of programmers and code?
This is an even stronger case than anything being discussed in this thread. Oracle claimed to own code written by their own employees on their clock and still lost this case. Google won their claim of fair use.
That's exactly and explicitly what an MIT licensed open source project would fall under: fair use by the employer and nobody owns it despite the original author also happening to work for said employer. Authorship is distinct from ownership. As well, there's the notion of role vs identity. You can act under the role of an employee to fork a public repo for your employer's purposes, yet act under the role of the upstream author to have published something more generic in the past without knowledge of your employer's future use case. Your identity is irrelevant. The only thing that really matters is that the public repo does not contain code proprietary to any business. It's on the employer claiming the code is proprietary to prove it. Examples from the article would be those data science functions, the UI they wanted, etc.
Do people not realize why these licenses exist in the first place? What do you all think they were doing over there at MIT to draft up such a license?
This has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Whether Oracle owns the copyright to that code is independent of whether Google’s use of it qualifies as fair use.
In Oracle v. Google, not even actual ownership impeded fair use. Nobody really owns the code on a public repo, so there's your answer to #1. The employee can use the code they authored and published to the world without any issues.
Now for question 2...
> what we’re talking about
What you're talking about.
You're correct that Oracle v. Google does not give any clear answers on ownership. For that you have to rely on the license applied to the project. It's simple. If you publish a project under a permissive license and your project does not contain anything proprietary, nobody owns it. Employment contracts don't have anything to do with this situation.
But, what does it really mean to "own" code? What is owned? The concept or the literal sequence of chars? It seems to be the latter which Google showed is trivially sidestepped by rewriting the code behind an API. Thus ownership is pointless in software unless it's closed source and proprietary, which is the opposite of a fun little Excel clone, amateur video game, etc.
The only thing enforceable about an employment contract is the clause about terminating an employee for working on side projects on the company time and/or with company property such that it takes away from productivity towards their work. I don't think anyone is talking about that or would even think of doing that though.
It's a work of art. Even this comment is a violation of the agreement, since I don't own the copyright to anything I do apparently, either in or out of the scope of my employment, so therefore I can't give Y Combinator a license to display this comment.
I even talked to the company's legal team about the absurdity of the agreement & they were unwilling to budge.
Many programmers sign this. I directly know that at least two FAANG employers (and probably all of them), have extremely broad copyright assignment clauses in their employment agreements that claim ownership of every software you create, on or off the clock, using company equipment or your own equipment. And many people work for these companies.
Whether these are enforceable or not doesn't matter because a lone developer is not going to go up against an army of corporate lawyers to find out.
Completely false. Most people sign job contracts without thinking too hard. And side projects just aren’t important for the majority of programmers, so why would they care?
I highly doubt that this is true, at least in the US. Can you cite case law?
You can write a contract granting ownership of all the songs a musician performs, or all the books a writer writes during a specified time period. Why shouldn't the same be true of programmers and code?