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?
