At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included by refe

At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included by reference the entire OIN Linux system definition, specifically to avoid any complication related to employees contributing patches back to the open source tools they used in the course of their work (and accordingly this covered not just work done on their own time, but also contributions made the course of their work). Employees were also invited to nominate additional pieces of software fairly liberally, particularly free software that didn't overlap with the organization's central business. While promoting permissive approaches like this with other organizations I've encountered employers which seem to have a some confusion about the purposes of different parts of their agreement. E.g. an IP agreement is essentially unrelated to making sure an employee is doing their job-- so a "I don't want them spending a lot of time on that" isn't a valid reason to impinge their rights, after all they would be perfectly able to slack off by staring blankly at the coffee pot regardless of what your IP agreement says. An IP agreement should be about having a clear boundary on company property, it's not a replacement for effective management. Unless you're an operating system company (which to some extent google is, but very few of the innumerable companies that copy google's practices are), trivial fixes to widely used open source software are not good candidates for company property and are not at all candidates for it if developed on the employee's own time.