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Comment by lordmatty | Hacker News Reader

I can understand the reaction on this community to the news, and I'm sure that there are elements of PR and recruitment strategy here, but I happen to know that the primary driver is pretty sound; job satisfaction for top employees.

Goldmans has its share of top programmers and, like any company, is keen to retain them. One of these people made contributing to Open Source a major goal for last year.

Well done to him, and well done to GS for supporting him. The company (rightly) gets a ton of bad press, but that doesn't mean it can't do good things as well.

Disclaimer: I'm an ex GS employee, but have nothing to gain.

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When I interviewed at GS last year, I was explicitly told that I would not be able to go on working on open source (they had checked out both my blog and my Github). This despite none of the technologies in my main project being in use in the group I was interviewing with...

I guess it probably depends on the position/team. I wouldn't expect GS to open source anything they consider a competitive advantage, but then I don't see Google open sourcing their search algos either :-)

There's a difference between "you can't open source some/all of our code" and "you can't work on unrelated open source projects in your free time".

I agree. I can't say I like standard practise of employers owning everything their employees do whether in or out of work, or requiring that you stop anything they don't own.

However, this is hardly something that is limited to Goldmans or financial services. I'm pretty sure that Apple require you not to work on side projects, for example.

We had a discussion regarding this at my company - Future Workshops - last week, and decided that what people work on in their own time is their own business, with the caveats that a) people don't work in conflict with any clients, b) the IP is clearly separate, and c) it doesn't affect their day job in a negative way.

Let's not call this a "standard" practice. In my experience, most companies do no make claims to your off-the-hours projects. And that is how it should be. Unless you're doing some cutting edge AI research or something of that sort, this kind of legal claim is just paranoid stupidity. Even if you do cutting edge AI research, it shouldn't entitle your employer to own a phpBB patch you've done in your free time.

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