> While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice.

The problems you are describing are not actually "problems in practice", as you say. They are theoretical problems.

In practice: You can just do stuff. There is no subroutine on your computer stopping the git push. In practice: Employers just write stuff in their employement contracts. They'll write everything they possibly can, to cover asses in every possible direction. If they're allowed to just write stuff, why aren't you allowed to just do stuff? Nothing matters. In practice: Roughly zero open source projects have had their IP challenged because of this technicality.

▲ mrob 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You might be comfortable taking that risk yourself, but if you misrepresent your FOSS contributions as your own copyright you impose that risk on third parties. Tricking people into infringing your employer's copyright is asshole behavior.

	▲	__MatrixMan__ 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Has that ever happened? I'd be surprised if there was any actual burden on the upstream maintainer to care whether I was on my lunch break or whether I was on the clock when I made the fix.

▲ em-bee 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

when you commit code to a project you are warranting that you have the legal right to do so. the bigger projects will not even accept your contribution done at work without an explicit permission from your employer.

this is not just about you and your risk, but also about the risk for the project.

	▲	__MatrixMan__ an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What does that rejection look like? Do they refuse to merge the PR until you send them a document or something? As far as I'm aware these legal dark corners are uninhabited. If you say: `> I was blocked, so I fixed a bug, and rather than wasting time maintaining an internal fork in violation of the OSS project's license, I complied with that license by contributing my fix upstream.` I've never met a manager or a maintainer who would suggest that you open the can of worms by contacting a lawyer about it. We all know that intellectual property is a bit of a farce, especially as applied to software that was written jointly by an employee and model that was likely trained on the OSS project in the first place. But it's not a problem unless it's a Problem, so as long as no party is injured, why make it one?
	▲	vinckr 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		in most cases you dont need explicit permission but you need to sign a CLA (Individual Contributor License Agreement) - which kind of includes permission

▲ zokier 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you heard of DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin)?