I wonder if the commenter asked his company about the specific case.
The contractual blanket bans usually say “cannot [do anything] without prior written permission” or something. It’s a big difference between “hey do you mind if I write some software that our competitors can use too, and maybe include some of our own secret sauce”, and “software we use has a bug, can I fix it for myself at source”.
In my experience what's actually going on is a mix between "no, we don't do that here" and you're technically allowed but unless it breaks production you're not even given time to put a day or two into submitting a bugfix. Much more likely to merge the fix locally or something stupid. No idea about this poster, of course. Phrasing it as "my employer doesn't let me" would be less specific, but maybe also not wrong in this case.
Comments
I wonder if the commenter asked his company about the specific case.
The contractual blanket bans usually say “cannot [do anything] without prior written permission” or something. It’s a big difference between “hey do you mind if I write some software that our competitors can use too, and maybe include some of our own secret sauce”, and “software we use has a bug, can I fix it for myself at source”.
In my experience what's actually going on is a mix between "no, we don't do that here" and you're technically allowed but unless it breaks production you're not even given time to put a day or two into submitting a bugfix. Much more likely to merge the fix locally or something stupid. No idea about this poster, of course. Phrasing it as "my employer doesn't let me" would be less specific, but maybe also not wrong in this case.