Maybe I've just gotten lucky, but at companies I've worked for I've usually gotten the go-ahead to contribute upstream on open source projects so as long as it'

Maybe I've just gotten lucky, but at companies I've worked for I've usually gotten the go-ahead to contribute upstream on open source projects so as long as it's something important for what we are working on. The only reason I didn't do a whole lot as part of my work at Google is because most of the open source projects I contributed to at Google were Google projects that I could contribute to from the google3 side, and that doesn't count.