It's ridiculous that industry doesn't understand that by disallowing their employees to participate in the Open Source movement in no way benefits them.

There are two main problems that result in situation's like these occuring. The first is that the people who make the decisions do not understand the benefits open source provides their company with. These benefits include:

• Reducing the amount of in house code their company has to produce to keep itself running.
• Giving employees opportunities to sharpen their skills so they are of greater value to the company.
• Providing a good work environment that will keep employees happy (read: productive) while attracting other talented employees.
• Improving the company's public image.

The other major problem was well addressed in the article you link to:

The company knew how to lock me in with the employment contract, but when the time came to unlock it, no one seemed to have the keys.

I also agree with his conclusion that implementing a clear policy to allow employees to participate in open source development is very healthy for the company.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.