Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-)

I'm really glad to hear that Google made this step, now if they would drop the overly expansive ownership claim in their employment agreement and the right to surveillance on personal property it would be a much more employee friendly place.

I also hope that it gives them an edge in hiring which would encourage other employers to follow suit in order to be competitive.

>> overly expansive ownership claim

Yeah, that particular clause gave me a looong pause before signing their contract, in fact I even seriously considered taking one of the other offers I had. This is why you see all those "happens to be owned by Google" disclaimers on open source projects. This means the person wrote this code on their own time, yet it's owned by Google anyway, which IMO is total employee-hostile bullshit.

I would not sign something like that contract today. At the time, though, the money differential and the allure of having Google on my resume outweighed the concerns. I have since discovered other companies can be a lot less possessive of the stuff I build on my own time and dime.

> "happens to be owned by Google" disclaimers on open source projects

Not sure I've seen this before, do you have examples?