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.
There are two questions here:
1) Can the employee use the code at work?
2) Who owns the code?
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.