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Comment by nbsd4life | Hacker News Reader

If you like open source, don't work for Apple.

I've seen multiple people stop all their open source contributions and communicating online after being hired by them. I assume they have very draconian NDAs.

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From what I hear, at Apple you're not allowed to contribute to open source projects (unless it's part of your day job) even in your own time - in contrast to Google (from what I hear) and Facebook (personal experience) where you can but you must clear it with legal and it can't be related to your day job.

And how does it work in CA? AFAIU, there're laws which prevent such limitations in most cases. I.e. everything which is done on the person's time is their own choice.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

Can anyone else please confirm for apple.

Nobody is going to confirm it in any way you’ll find acceptable (like verifiable list of names/contributions), for one obvious reason: Apple employees tend not to post identifiably in public because articles (like this one) try to extrapolate public knowledge with hilariously wrong guesses at the roadmap, and it creates risk that isn’t worth the trade offs for the employee.

Unless you happen to work on one of the open source projects they're involved with, I suppose. LLVM, Clang, Webkit etc.

Apache Traffic Server

Or CUPS or Darwin.

No major technology company open sources their Crown Jewels.

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