I used the last sentence as the title
(acknowledgement: extracted from Risks Digest 32.61)
Subject: IBM Clarifies Stance On Developers Working On Open-Source
Projects In Off-Hours (Phoronix)
Earlier this week was a surprising Linux kernel networking commit that
removed an IBM engineer as one of the driver maintainers for the IBM Power
SR-IOV Virtual NIC driver. Seemingly at issue with this VNIC driver work was
the developer using his personal email address in working on the driver in
his off-hours. IBM has now clarified their stance on such work.
The VNIC maintainer updating patch yielded much attention for carrying the
following quoted message, "As an IBM employee, you are not allowed to use
your gmail account to work in any way on VNIC. You are not allowed to use
your personal email account as a "hobby". You are an IBM employee 100% of
the time. Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I
grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change."
IBM has now reached out to Phoronix to provide further comment. They shared
that contrary to the Git commit, "IBM promotes and encourages engagement in
the Linux open source community regardless whether an IBM email ID or a
personal email ID is used."
When asked about this specific situation that portrays the direct opposite
of their communication, Todd Moore, VP Open Technology at IBM explained: "We
respect our developer's need to be individuals, and their open source code
contributed under a personal ID represents them and their resume. This was a
one off disagreement that should not have gone public as there are internal
guidelines to resolve it. Often our contributors will have a personal GitHub
ID and an IBM GitHub ID. We use tooling to track contributions under both
IDs to ensure everyone gets credit towards our recognition program. We value
and encourage contribution whether it be code, code reviews, documentation,
issue triage, or advocacy as part of their careers or their own time."
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IBM-Open-Source-Leisure-Work
Someone speculated: ``Interesting ... I believe that there is more to this
than meets the eye as the IBM employee changed his eMail from IBM to Gmail
just three days before receiving this reprimand. Very likely some kind of
disagreement between his employee and his id--t manager. This appears to be
an open source project that is owned/sponsored by IBM (all contributors have
an IBM eMail address) and working on this project (IBM Power network driver)
was a part of his job.''
Id--t managers are always a risk.