HN Explorer

What is your company's policy regarding contributing to open source?

4 points by namanaggarwal ↗ HN
I used to work for a company where it was a strict no no. They used to themselves use a lot of open source (who doesn't). Want to know if other companies are like that and reasons behind it.

4 comments

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giantg2
My company uses open source but the company will not contribute to it or allow you to contribute if it was anything related to work.

You can work on outside code projects, but they can't be related to the industry, help our competitors in any way, and we must get prior approval from the company.

I think most companies have restrictions like this. Your previous company seems a bit strict.

insaneisnotfree
Same here. My company uses open source a lot but will not be asigning any resources on contributing
giantg2
Yep. To give you an idea of how naive I was right out of college... I asked my company durning the interview if they contributed to open source after they told me some of the tools they use. They told me that they were putting together ideas to start contributing. It's been 8 years and they never have.
CM30
I don't think they have a policy about whether we can contribute to open source software. They certainly don't care what we work on outside of work hours, and they probably wouldn't care very much if we contributed code to those projects inside work hours either, assuming it wasn't taking up time they'd prefer get used on company/client work.

So I think people's answers to your question will generally fall into three categories based on how tech orientated the company is and how big they are in general.

1. Companies that outright encourage open source work, perhaps even during work hours. I think quite a few FAANG companies are like this, and obviously the likes of Mozilla or Automattic would be as well.

2. Companies that disallow it/try to put limitations on what their employees can work on. Usually tech companies, though sometimes just large organisations in general.

3. And those that flat out don't care/don't control what employees do outside of work or don't know what open source is. My experience is that many agencies and mom and pop companies tend to be like this, as do those that are completely unrelated to the tech industry.