It is hard to find something that can't somehow be considered to compete with Apple. And in CA you can be let go for no reason, so... For example, I couldn't get approval to contribute patches to a gallery plugin for Wordpress that I was using for my personal blog, because you know, the Photos app is a gallery of photos.

I hope you quit after that. Working for a company so draconian and anti-society would drive me mad.

I stayed a few years for a few reasons, first because it is still a good company with a “real” product, and also because 99% of my time there was spent working on open-source (clang/llvm). When I decided to quit, it was in part because of their open source policy.

There are tons of developers who not only don't care about writing open source software on the side, actually go home after working 8 hours a days on computers and decide not to do any code at all and spend time on other hobbies, with their family, etc.

Actually, going home my wife would be the one complaining about not being able to do what she wanted with the blog and asking me to fix it ;)

Sure, I bet he quit his $150k/yr job to write free Wordpress plugins.

...or he could get another $150k/yr job at a company that allows him to write free WordPress plugins on the side.