Google has a thing called "IARC" (https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing#...) where you make an application with details about what you're done or have done, and if it's approved, you get to own the copyright.

If you want to release it as open source and don't care about owning the copyright, there's a process you can go through to release a new open source project. If you just want to send patches to an existing project, you can generally just do that, as long as the project has an approved open source license and is not on the (short) list of disallowed projects.

I don't currently work there, so take this with a grain of salt, that said, it would seem Google is a lot more relaxed about this sort of thing than any other large company I've seen. Lots of ex-Google employees end up doing all sorts of things and lots of Googlers participate in open source

Not FAANG, but GitHub explicitly allows employees to work on side-projects while retaining the IP rights, and you get paid Microsoft stock.

Whats hilarious is that this is definitely not the case for regular MS employees

The MS employees I've met/interviewed were literally not allowed to read open source code or sample code on Q&A websites. Of course that was mostly 5+ years ago and I don't exactly ask them if their policies have changed.

When at Microsoft I was expected to be on top of Stack Overflow for our product, and there's a whole program where if you contribute to open source you get to vote on where the monthly OSS sponsorship goes.

I've linked to WebKit source before in exec reviews and no one bats an eye. So, changed, I'd say.

Im on StackOverflow all the time and we use OSS code all over the place. Either they were pulling your leg or you badly misunderstood something they said.

I did not. Talk to some MacBU people.

It is in California at least - you can moonlight on whatever you want when you are not on company time or equipment.

Our vacation also doesn't expire and we also don't have non-compete clauses.

This is not how California law works, because you left out the (in this case very important) part where this is exclusive to things that don’t compete with your employer. If you work at a FAANG, the number of things they work on is very large and consequently they will claim large control over what you do.

Which means it will eventually be the law.

Netflix. As long as you don't compete directly with the business, the company doesn't care (at least that's how I interpreted my contract when I joined a while ago).

> As long as you don't compete directly with the business, the company doesn't care

I've found, as long as you're not making money no one cares what you're doing. As soon as money starts coming in, a lot of people are very interested in what you're doing. My totally uninformed guess would be that one of the first questions Netflix (or really any company) has about your off-company-time product is 1) does it make money and 2) how much. The answers to those questions will determine how the conversation goes from there, and how many lawyers are involved.

Bingo. Not FAANG but it definitely works like that in Ubisoft.

Not FAANG but Red Hat employees can contribute to open source on their own time — even if it competes with something that Red Hat makes.

Does Red Hat even make proprietary software? I thought the business model was to open source everything and charge for enterprise support and cloud services?

Right, it's all open source, but you could be making after-work contributions to open source projects that might not be in the interest of Red Hat, and that's perfectly fine.

The policy is public: https://www.redhat.com/licenses/RH_CoC-June_2020_Eng.pdf

"Participation in an open source community project, whether maintained by the Company or by another commercial or non-commercial entity or organization, does not constitute a conflict of interest even where you may make a determination in the interest of the project that is adverse to the Company’s interests."

A lot of employees were concerned about losing this after the IBM acquisition, but the former CEO made a lot of promises to us especially to protecting our autonomy, and (so far) IBM has kept those commitments to us.

I cannot imagine a more open source friendly place to work. I'm constantly surprised by how other companies operate open source projects or treat their employees who want to contribute to them (at work or otherwise). Unfortunately as Red Hat gets larger, we hire more people without that love of open source and they want to do things differently, but thankfully they don't get much traction.

Is that still true, post-IBM?

Can confirm this is still true, yes.

Develop or sell? No one cares unless you want to be a big name or big money.