Both ends of this subject are equally stupid and tone deaf. First of all the employee was working on a driver for an IBM product and is an IBM employee so the

Both ends of this subject are equally stupid and tone deaf. First of all the employee was working on a driver for an IBM product and is an IBM employee so the IBM opinion is not completely wrong even if awkward and extreme. If the employee wants to work on their employers products, even as a hobby outside of work, they should disclose their affiliation even if my email address. Secondly, many employers forbid moonlighting even when profit is not a motive. This is rare for a technology company but common for financial companies due to potential for ethical conflicts in both regulations and transfer of funds/services. On the other hand I remember submitting an RFC ID about 12 years ago for an alternative web technology where the technical merits of the idea would later become proposals in other forms more directly aligned to HTML5. The idea went back and forth on the mailing list about how it wasn’t worth considering unless directly aligned with HTML5 regardless of any technical merits. I eventually said “fuck this” and left. I remember after that side comments about how I wasn’t really employed by Sabre. I listed Sabre as my primary employer on the last page of the document. I didn’t have a Sabre Holdings email address because I worked for Travelocity a wholly owner subsidiary that did not own IP (Sabre did). I was also contributing to the mailing list using my military email because I wrote the document while working at Travelocity but had temporarily separated for a military deployment to Afghanistan. Fuck that group. My experience from working on open source taught me that an employer owns it and can slap a patent on it if not already exposed to the public. So, always expose your hobby work to the public using extreme licenses like AGPLv3 or CC0-1.0 and completely separate that work from any revenue stream until you are ready to incorporate.