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> yet they donate little or nothing to it,

It is all about knowing individual engineers inside these companies. Nearly any engineer in FAANG can, with a little effort, donate their own work time to an opensource project in the form of submitting patches.

The project can help in various ways. Make sure licensing stuff is in place so that whatever IP review process the company has goes smoothly. Make sure PR's are reviewed fast. Delegate responsibility ('hi, would you like to be maintainer of this feature?'). Make sure contributions are publicly recognised (ie. Public page of maintainers/biggest contributors).

Remember that most engineers inside big companies are trying to generate good content for their performance review. "Wrote and open source some code" is usually one of the checkboxes.



> Nearly any engineer in FAANG can, with a little effort, donate their own work time to an opensource project in the form of submitting patches.

I know at least one of those letters that does not want you doing that without jumping through hoops and getting prior approvals. I will let you guess which one that is.


Thats the "with a little effort" bit. But as long as you have a business case (eg. "we are adding this feature for our use, but it will lower our costs if it is upstreamed rather than maintained as a private patch"), it will usually be greenlighted.


Writing open source code is not one of my FAANG check boxes. Could maybe do it as 20% with lawyer approval.


Typically FAANGs have a clause that they own everything that you code even outside of working hours.


No, Meta’s contract has explicit carve-outs for Open-Source work done on personal time that are more generous than Canonical’s (I had to choose between the two 3 months ago).

Meta has its own production fork of CPython, Cinder:

https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder


This isn't legal/enforceable in California. Your own work on your own time on your own equipment is your own property. It's messier if you're building a direct competitor or using proprietary knowledge.

There's a whole Silicon Valley episode on this.




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