What you describe requires employee IP to prevail. At scale it’s simply not practical to operate that way. Across hundreds of developers, thousands of customers, multiple countries (enter language barrier) and several decades, it would be a disorganized mess with direction of the developers changing with the wind. A small software company (I.E Insite/Quickship for a long time) can totally get away with this, but anyone large it’s just not possible.
This thread is a perfect example. Jose and I know the ICE framework at the nitty gritty level, where the sausage is made, and I couldn’t even tell you where to start with this. I would never report this to development and expect them to do anything with it.