
What is your company's policy regarding contributing to open source? - namanaggarwal
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&#x27;t). Want to know if other companies are like that and reasons behind it.
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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.

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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.

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insaneisnotfree
Same here. My company uses open source a lot but will not be asigning any
resources on contributing

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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.

