> Has Google or any other company actually used this for "evil" though?
From the original Twitter thread:
> usbmuxd was rejected without an explanation. My follow-up email asking for clarification was ignored.
> I ended up having to hand over maintainership of usbmuxd.
Different people have different thresholds for evil, but I consider that to be at least unethical. OP was working on usbmuxd before they joined Google. If Google wanted ownership, that should have been discussed during the hiring process. To hire someone, require them to submit a 'request' to retain ownership, and then pull the rug out from under their feet -- I think that's unethical, even if usbmuxd was a conflict of interest.
But of course, OP wasn't working on anything that would make usbmuxd a conflict of interest. Google's policy was, "because someone somewhere in our company is working on something similar, we own it." I think that's also an unethical overreach. If I'm hired to work on A, I don't think I should need to care that someone else at the company is working on B. My conflicts of interest and related software should be determined based on the parts of the software I'm involved in.
I would posit that this stuff isn't a theoretical concern, that OP demonstrated its an unethical policy that is actively being used for unethical reasons.