4 ms·

Not sure where you got that but it is not true. MS employees are free to make non competing open source projects in their own time on their own hardware.

• giaour 2y ago
  There's even a company wide incentive program for running or contributing to outside open source projects. (Source: I work for Microsoft, maintain a couple small projects, have contributed to outside projects, and have gotten token but official rewards for doing so.)
  • Hamuko 2y ago
    What kind of token rewards are we talking about?
    • brayhite 2y ago
      Non-fungible ones
    • giaour 2y ago
      MS runs a grant program that awards $10K each month to one open source program. There's a vote each month to decide which project will get it, and you are only eligible to vote if you contributed to a OSS project not affiliated with Microsoft or were a maintainer for an outside OSS project that received contributions from some threshold number of devs within the last 30 days. Very much a token reward, but I was surprised to learn when I first got notified about having a vote that: A) Microsoft actively tracks my outside activity on GitHub[1], and B) that they encourage it. [1]: This would have been creepy if I hadn't agreed to it by linking my GitHub account to my corporate identity. I make a lot of contributions to official MS open source projects and didn't want to make a separate work account.
• helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  I thought there was even (or used to be) a clause in the contract saying that outside work was allowed but had to be disclosed - and possibly could be prohibited.