> I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.

All large organizations have a decent amount of bureaucracy around copyright and IP, but the difference is good ones make it easy and straightforward for employees to go through that process.

Google, for example, has a well-documented and clear process for contributing to open source software (both in work hours and in personal time): https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/