[asdfghjkjnmhb]

You forgot the bit where if you work for a company you need to get approval from 18levels of management and corporate lawyers on 3 continents who have never heard of free software - and you are on the receiving end of the political flak.

Or if you work for a US company and are writing FOSS on your own time - you still risk getting fired because one of the managers or lawyers (who have never heard of FOSS) think it breaks your employment contract and it's a cheap way of reducing head count.

[SoftwareMaven]

Has this ever really happened? This sounds more like apocryphal legends meant to scare young developers about that big, bad manager in the closet.

[uxp]

I personally know of two people from one company that were fired for contributing a patch to a popular open sourced IDE that the company used for development, of which the bug hampered the development for the company. It was a strongarmed political move for management to retain control over the personal actions of their employees.

This is all anecdotal anyways. I doubt it happens all the time, but these two were forced to sign an NDA on their way out. It makes me wonder how many times it does happen where no one is allowed to talk about it.

[tjr]

Do you know if, in this case, they worked on the patch on company time, or on their own time?

[asdfghjkjnmhb]

Being fired - don't know.

But if you are a minion at, say MSFT, imagine how many layers of management a sign-off would go up before somebody said - yes you can assign copyright to that little utility to Gnu.