Perhaps I’m misreading this, but it appears that IBM employed him to work on this kernel driver. He was getting paid to do this, but he used his personal e-mail

Perhaps I’m misreading this, but it appears that IBM employed him to work on this kernel driver. He was getting paid to do this, but he used his personal e-mail address. IBM wanted him to attribute his IBM-paid work for hire to IBM. If IBM was prohibiting employees from working on unrelated projects in their off time, that would obviously be bad. However, if they’re paying people to work on teams to develop open-source code, it’s not unreasonable to expect them to use their IBM e-mail address to do it.