One reason given is this:
> Assuming the OSS projects aren't a conflict of interest
Apple is so secretive even internally that you can never guarantee whatever you're working on in your free time does not conflict what someone at Apple is working on secretly.
It's easy to demonstrate diligence and commitment by forbidding, much easier than showing how good you are at your job by allowing instead. Which would demonstrate what? Wisdom and balanced judgement perhaps? Great qualities, but difficult to show off. Forbidding is the low-hanging fruit of appearing strong.
The general attitude I encountered inside the company was either feeling defeated about it or feeling that Amazon had a competitive advantage because they were one of the few companies shrewd enough to take without giving back.
S3 and EC2 were released while I was there, and that started to change things. Suddenly motives to interoperate with open source were appearing. Sometimes that even meant giving back improvements that made projects fit the AWS ecosystem better. Their customers were also now software developers, many of whom would not welcome their explicitly greedy posture. That opening up was just starting when I left so I don't have a very deep view of it.
A funny thing happened after I left. I was working on an open source project created by my new employer that ended up being popular for a while in teaching distributed systems to undergrads. It was a great "gateway drug" for a new-ish AWS service. The GM of that service asked me to come to their very first AWS conference to talk about the project. I asked if I should mention that I worked at Amazon previously. The GM didn't just say yes, they introduced me as a previous Amazon employee - they very much wanted to be seen as aligned with and supporting open source. They also gave me AWS credits to hand out when I spoke about the project at PyCon and elsewhere.
That's the thing - people don't have "free time". Most employment contracts are actually enslavement when it comes to IP. That's why corporations lobby governments to stop workers going B2B.
Note this is a mostly US perspective, e.g. AFAIK in Switzerland what you do in your own time, and with your own equipment is entirely your own under Federal law. And that seems totally fair.
Of course if you steal code or ideas from your employer, then things get a bit more grey.
That's a very one-sided take. (Not commenting on Apple's policy, just commenting generally.) This great article explains why IP contracts are the way they are: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
Lol, what?
I have a hard time understanding the rest of this post. It's certainly been my impression that Apple indeed has pretty draconian policies regarding who you can be whence you join Apple.
> That’s an aggressive and frankly stupid misinterpretation of the policy which has pretty good reasons to exist when contextualized.
100% matches with what I've heard & seen in the world. Maybe coincidentally zero people who've been swallowed into the Apple mothership still have interest in the work they used to be up to, maybe they're all so much happier suddenly working quietly. But to me the Occam's Razor here is pretty fucking bliss fucking obvious son: these people working on good interesting projects & being vocal all shut the fuck up & stop contributing because they have to. Because that's the corporate policy. Because that's fucking Apple. That's the biggest most enormous computing empire on the planet doing what it does.
Edit: oh look at the edits on this post!!! Yeahhhhhh
Edit2: see my other comment. It's even more to the heart of things. "I'm glad there's the bare minimum of sticks to try to rub together to give the impression Apple gives the faintest most minimal flying fuck about any compute other than Apple computing, that they see any value in a bigger computing ecosystem. Apple is not at all a company that gives any impressions that they care about anyone but those that fall within the light of their empire."
This is such a sad fucking age for computing in general. "Create more value than you capture" is now a bunch of torn apart body parts on the floor, savaged, by massive ultra-industrialized super-powers. Apple is one of the leading forces promoting happiness in slavery, insisting that only by domination can we consumers ever find freedom & happiness. To pretend that such a company relates to open source in any positive way is repulsive in extreme.
This sounds similar to Amazon policies I'd read on HN, but I can't remember if they were barring OSS activity or claiming ownership of.
As a Red Hatter I find this mindset mind-boggling, but I'm heavily biased and on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. There's always a balance to be struck around policy depending on the org/industry/etc, but a blanket "no" is ridiculous.