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Comment by Anon1096 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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