Comment by 0x8BADF00D
7 years ago
> In those cases, your employer would own your contributions and thus you need permission from them to license their copyrighted work (your changes) under whatever the project license is.
How does your employer own what you do in your free time? AFAIK there is no job contract like that which is legally enforceable. At least in California.
It depends on the country. In some countries, work related to your job but done outside work (or work using company resources like a company laptop -- I believe in California this is also the case) might possibly be owned by your employer (if your work contract says so). For instance if you work on databases and in your free time you developed a really awesome database from scratch, that might be owned by your employer because of the training and learning resources your employer provided (I think this is the reasoning -- but personally I find it quite abhorrent).
But I assumed that GP was talking about wanting to contribute something they did on work time, not on their own time.
It's jurisdiction by jurisdiction. And even if it's not enforceable, it might still be very expensive to duke that issue out in the courts.
Worrying about these details is the last thing a project maintainer needs to be worrying about. Easier to just require everyone to have a belt, even the ones who say they own suspenders.