Ask HN: Why does Microsoft prohibit employee personal open source projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does Microsoft prohibit employee personal open source projects?

25 pointsamichail25 comments

If the open source personal project doesn't compete directly with a commercial Microsoft product, then what is the problem?

View on HN

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.

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.)

What kind of token rewards are we talking about?

Non-fungible ones

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.

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.

MS is too big for any one person to know what businesses they're in, have been in, have rights obligations around, or will be in in the future. It's quite possible that any side hustle project will, in fact, be competing with Microsoft now or in the future. Your project might also unintentionally contain Microsoft IP or things where they have rights obligations to others. It's not worth the risk to them.

Isn't big tech in a fierce competition for employees?

> Isn't big tech in a fierce competition for employees?

It sure seems to be in a fierce competition with employees.

Huh? No. Not since 2022. Catch up.

Not so much any more. Lots of layoffs.

You will find that almost all big tech places various restrictions on employee open source contributions, ranging from the draconian "prohibited by default" at Apple to "usually ok if you assign copyright to the company and use only company-approved licenses" at Google.

Big tech competes for employees through prestige, paycheck size, perks, and interesting projects. Not through open source policies.

Same as most companies that have the "all IP you produce belongs to us" clause:

There's no (financial) upside to them doing this, and it runs the risk of you open-sourcing something which someone else in the company is trying to be protectionist about. Or is actually Microsoft IP.

It's annoying, but sometimes you can negotiate exceptions.

I’ve heard that this is unenforceable in practice but I’m not sure in which jurisdiction.

I’ve always referred to that as “The Shower Clause,” because they own the ideas that you come up with, in the shower.

I suspect they would be difficult to enforce, but many of these agreements are designed as intimidation, rather than as true contracts. Even if they are unenforceable, you still need to hire a lawyer, and take them to court, and won’t be recompensed for your time and attorney’s fees.

Previous MSFT employee of about 7 years (left about 3 years ago) - this was totally not true. In fact, we were encouraged to make non-competing contributions and I worked with several peers that had very successful open source projects.

Can you provide some context? Do you mean MS employees are prohibited from doing open source even outside work hours?

Can we address the "if" question before asking the "why" question?

I'm no Microsoft employee, but I really like to see specific policy wording and understand the context before looking at any comment. Honestly I don't understand why we have such a blanket "ask HN" in the first place.

Microsoft under Ballmer, and Microsoft under Nadella is a night and day difference.

They removed the moonlighting line in hiring contract AFAIK. I.e you can make hour own open source project in your non-employment hours with your hardware without any company IP.

MS VScode or .NET core would never be OS under Ballmer.

Completely not true. Apple, on the other hand, does have a policy somewhat like that (source: it was one of the reasons I didn’t leave Microsoft for Apple a few years back, although it was a negotiable matter to a degree)

While this may be true, i can do you one better. Personally know of someone who has multiple commercial side endeavors of varying successes, while working there, so it is doable...

I didn’t know that, and quite likely I’m not in the minority! The irony is Microsoft owns the biggest open source platform GitHub, and sells products and services such as code pilot which thrives on open source prior art. This deserves more publicity! At the same time Microsoft hires people that are main shepherds of open source projects, such as GvR do not sure how that arrangement works.

You didn’t know that because OP just made it up.

It's really hard to not compete with any big company like Microsoft.

Not true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com