I'm a fan of anything that helps open source, but in my experience it's more effective if the employee is able to work on open source projects as part of their job. Then again, maybe that's just my current evening burnout talking.
Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS. Our team can already contribute to OSS on their work time when it relates to their work, or our own projects, but for the personal interest/passion projects without direct benefit for us as a company, it doesn't scale. Doubly so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than 40 hours a week.
We have failsafes in place in case anybody gets a bit too excited about free time OSS. We limit the Sauce hours you can do in a month for this reason, but nobody has hit that max yet, so it doesn't seem to be a systemic problem.
Is HR ready for this increase in applications from this post and the comments?
The post mentions an exact clockout time as well - 5pm. Out of interest is it a strict 9-5 schedule, or is it flexible but 40 hours a week? Have you written anything about the no overtime policy or 9-5 schedule (if that's enforced) and how you find that?
Why can't you?
Professors get paid full professor salaries to do "random research".
Doctors get paid full doctor salaries to treat "random illnesses".
I expect if you looked a bit closer, you'll find that "Random OSS" is maintenance that makes the entire ecosystem possible. Would love to hear from some of your engineers what they are doing to earn that $20/hr.
And doctors treating 'random illnesses' doesn't really work as an analogy–that would be more like if they could randomly decide to turn away patients they didn't 'want' to treat.
Really interesting to read this and from you via hackernews :D
If they do too much random OSS to a point where it prevents them from achieving your business goals, you can terminate them.