My experience, in my part of the company, in 2019, is that stuff I do outside "work" is my own business. I contribute to open source projects all over the place.

As long as I actually do my day job during the daytime, woe betide anyone (other than my wife and family) who tells me what I should be doing with my non-work hours, on unrelated software projects.

They even let me release my skunkworks Pidgin Linux client for Chime under LGPL (although I did have to ask permission for that one as I did a bunch of it during the day).

In fact even for work hours when I'm working on Linux, we've made progress. Once upon a time you had to file a ticket to legal for every patch series that was submitted upstream.

Now we have a policy (again, in our part of the company) that your internal code review submission must have a comment on the upstream status of your patch — is it already upstream, is it going upstream, and if not, WHY NOT?

And all you need in the way of permission to do so is to get the nod from myself or a number of other people right there in that code review.

Is it perfect? No.

Do we still have to catch up and make it as easy for other projects (like Xen, in my day-to-day work) as it is for Linux? Yes.

Is it a massive improvement on what it was like before? Hell yes.