Software written off the clock that does not compete with the employer is not only not the property of the employer, but any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable.
Many businesses even actively encourage their developers to contribute to open source projects.
Which likely means your "free time" code you decided to do to make your job easier now belongs to your employer since they asked you to write it (albeit indirectly in this situation).
Will anything come of it for trivial stuff? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it's ok.
Unless you have something in writing saying otherwise, best not to mix stuff like this because one day you might wind up on the wrong side of an army of lawyers.
Especially when you have problem A at work, then some time later write "generic code" that solves problem A, then some time later "import" the code to your dayjob to solve problem A. And double so if nobody else ever uses this generic code and you never use it for anything else.
As an industry we talk a lot about flexibility, particularly in scheduling and when we do our work, but you can't have it both ways. You can't be doing laundry and mowing the lawn and going grocery shopping in the middle of the work day because it helps you think or it helps your programming process, but then make the argument that because you wrote this code at 6 PM on a Sunday it's yours and not your employers, when you committed it to your employer's git repo Monday morning. Not with a straight face, at least.
I want to be clear, I'm all about getting shit done during the day. If I need to get a haircut at 2:30 PM, I will. But I'm also not pretending that my employer's code is mine or that I have any right to publish it.
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?
By all means try stuff out with some hobby project but don't be an idiot and tell your employer you've reused 'their' code (or at least, code in their codebase) for other clients. Either get an agreement up front or keep it secret.
A contract that grants your employer copyright to code you wrote and used in their codebase is easily enforceable. An exception would be code you wrote before the contract, but in that case using the code without some kind of agreement up front is still dangerous.
If that code touched their work laptop (which it did since he showed it), it's now company property.
That code most likely belongs to Uber legally, but they probably don't care that much.
Which is, you know, hard to argue against if you wrote the code during your employment and copied it into the code base you were hired to work on.
The next day you download it onto your work laptop and use it to solve problem X. I don't think there's any reasonable interpretation where your company now owns it.
