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> You are an IBM employee 100% of the time.

This seems very much the case sadly ... a friend of mine is working as a software engineer at IBM (in Europe) and they indeed are not allowed to use their personal accounts to make open source contributions in their spare time. They would have to ask IBM legal to sign off on everything. Sad life.

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That was also the case for CSIRO, Australia's largest government scientific organisation, when I worked there years ago. We had a lot of open source collaboration products but they were tightly managed and approved.

Legal were so backlogged that approval for anything other than a strategic project was impossible.

I was not allowed to submit work to unapproved projects, other than my personal stuff I'd listed as my own IP on being hired.

It's usually about IP protection ahead of brand protection.

This must be illegal in many places in Europe, though.

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