One obstacle to a company developing a "hacker ethic" is invention assignment clauses in employee agreements. There seems to be a fundamental tension between c

One obstacle to a company developing a "hacker ethic" is invention assignment clauses in employee agreements. There seems to be a fundamental tension between carefree experimentation and "everything you build which is even remotely related to our business belongs to us". If you are passionate about your job -- and many companies want you to be passionate -- and if you are a hacker/builder then sooner or later you're probably going to create something that falls into the purview of an assignment agreement. For example, let's say you work for a game company and in your spare time, hack up a new way to do game physics. Even if you don't work on the game physics team, even if the company is already committed to using a third party physics engine, they may argue that your engine belongs to them. You have to entrust the fruits of your hacking to their stewardship; even if they allow the code to be open-sourced, it will go under their public Github account, not yours. I don't offer a solution to this problem; it is understandable that a company will feel you owe them something if you hack up something cool using the tricks and knowledge you gained while working for them. The more they encourage tinkering and play, the more they trade in creativity and innovation, the more they might suffer if an employee goes to another company with his/her hacks. I suppose it comes down to how much you trust the management of the company. A company can still have bad management, even if they mostly stand for hacker values. You may hack up a cool solution to a problem but the company may be unable to use it in a project because they are already implementing an inferior solution and are committed to a certain release date. Your hack might end up in a corporate purgatory; your company may refuse to use it in a product due to politics, "not invented here" syndrome of the team that would incorporate the hack, or competing priorities. However, the company will not allow you to take the hack to your next employer because they may claim you used company know-how to build it. The fear of litigation can be just as potent as the actual legal case for it. Even companies like Redhat or Mozilla may have trade secret/invention disclosure clauses that prevent employees from fully embracing "hacker ethics" even if they are better than most.