Most places I've worked, in the situations you're describing where you are doing bread-and-butter contributions to an open source project, submitting the PR bac

Most places I've worked, in the situations you're describing where you are doing bread-and-butter contributions to an open source project, submitting the PR back and contributing it was encouraged. Exceptions if we had a private fork with actual proprietary stuff or it was super-specific to our environment (but in that case, you probably did it wrong anyway). For cases where we develop something internally and want to open source it, it differs a lot between places. Some won't hear of it, some think it's great, and everywhere in between. Anything to the left of "won't hear of it" it usually boils down to "prove to me it doesn't contain any proprietary business processes that would directly benefit our competitors" and it's fine. Any of the more responsible shops is likely going to be pretty encouraging of actually committing back to open source projects, since that's what you're supposed to be doing in cases like this, and they'll realize that's how you ended up being able to run most of your business off of open source in the first place.