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0 pointsjbaudanza12y ago0 comments

Do you think Heroku requires its employees to get permission before hacking on OSS on the weekend? Facebook? Twitter? Even Amazon, which contributes relatively little, only asks that its employees use their private email addresses.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that you've decided to hold yourself above the lowest common denominator of tech companies. I just don't think you should be congratulating yourself publicly on HN for it.

In this industry, having a solid background in open source contributions is serious mark of credibility for any engineer. The rest of us are falling over ourselves to work with and encourage people that hack in their free time.

Are there any Rackspace engineers in the thread? Please tell me this is all legalese and nobody actually asks you to get your weekend pull requests approved by a legal department.

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kordless12y ago

There's nothing wrong with being proud about promoting something that is beneficial to all of us. I'm not sure why you are trying to put your own feelings in this and be negative about it, but whatever. I'm glad they are continuing to push on transparency and trust. It's going to be critical in the coming years. I, for one, am glad they are making it a priority.

And to answer your question, VanL is both an engineer and an attorney. I'm not sure he'd label himself as an executive either, but I'll let him speak for himself on that topic - as he should be allowed.

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