It's definitely not an unreasonable restriction for most, and those who don't like the policy don't have to work there. Your examples aren't helpful because th

It's definitely not an unreasonable restriction for most, and those who don't like the policy don't have to work there. Your examples aren't helpful because the don't address the issue, which is risk. In the examples provided there's really nothing about the 'personal work' that puts the employers position at risk. Which is why, by the way, schools don't generally defy teachers from teaching on the side. Or proofreaders etc.. In fact such limitations are rare outside industries with IP issues. Apple is a $1T company and all of that valuation is up for grabs by litigious people of various kinds who can use any kind of side-show tactic interpretation of the law to make money. So imagine someone 'working from home' on the 'same computer' that they use for work. What counts as 'work time' vs. 'personal time' when flipping back and forth between activities? How will a judge view this? Then you have competitive problems: you work on 'iMovie' for 1 hour, then you work on 'MyMovie' (personal) the hour. This creates ugly conflicts of interest. Then you have liability issues if Apple is seen to be contributing to an OSS without the right legal bits in place. It doesn't matter that it 'shouldn't' be a problem, what matters is that a bad actor + a lawyer can possibly make enough of a fuss to convince a judge that there's a problem 'Apple's contribution to this OSS code materially affected my business and it was no clear in the liscencing' etc.. As we've seen with Google/Uber, this stuff is very expensive, very strategic, can be very ambiguous, which is bad. There's so much grey in the equation, and so much at risk, it's simply not worth it for Apple and Amazon. So if you want to work there, that's it, you can't make games. It'd be nice if there were some kind of regulatory issues around it, but it'd have to be clear. I also think they should be nice enough to 'wave' people's rights to do certain things, like work on specific OSS projects.