What we did today was make a statement that encouraging participation in various communities and allowing Rackers to develop their skills whenever and however they want is both better for everyone and more consistent with our values. As obvious as this may be to you, we needed to do this in the proper way so that we could satisfy our duties to our shareholders.
I challenge you to find a public company with a similar policy. I have been around a long time, and I've never found one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that you've decided to hold yourself above the lowest common denominator of tech companies. I just don't think you should be congratulating yourself publicly on HN for it.
In this industry, having a solid background in open source contributions is serious mark of credibility for any engineer. The rest of us are falling over ourselves to work with and encourage people that hack in their free time.
Are there any Rackspace engineers in the thread? Please tell me this is all legalese and nobody actually asks you to get your weekend pull requests approved by a legal department.
And to answer your question, VanL is both an engineer and an attorney. I'm not sure he'd label himself as an executive either, but I'll let him speak for himself on that topic - as he should be allowed.
Google's policy was, for years, identical to this :)
(It is only slightly more onerous now, in that we ask to see the first few patches you contribute, mainly the result of too high a rate of unreasonable judgement generating actual issues, which I chalk up to statistics and having a really large number of engineers now)
I stand corrected, then. I had thought that Google's policy allowed contributions, but not under the employee's own copyright. I thought there was an additional step to get that approved.