You can’t make this stuff up. The second you believe the world has reached critical mass of the bizarro sort, another strange stunt is uncovered and you have to reset the count back at zero and start keeping track all over again. Recently, that very thing happened. An IBM employee was called to the carpet for using their personal email as a Linux kernel maintainer. 

Thing is, the developer is the maintainer of the IBM Power SR-IOV Virtual NIC driver for the upstream Linux kernel. Because of the work done, IBM should have some say in this matter, and it might make sense for the company to insist the employee use an official email address for commits in the kernel repository.

SEE: 5 Linux server distributions you should be using (TechRepublic Premium) 

IBM didn’t exactly handle this with much in the way of grace and tact. This was the statement IBM made to the maintainer (as detailed in this commit):

“As an IBM employee, you are not allowed to use your Gmail account to work in any way on VNIC. You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a ‘hobby’. You are an IBM employee 100% of the time. Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I grant you a one-time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change.”

In the above message, IBM goes too far. To say someone is an employee 100% of the time is a bit draconian. People have lives, and those lives are separate from company time. That developer isn’t paid for 100% of their time, so IBM should have no right to lay claim to any time that is not spent on company work—the precedent that would set could be disastrous. I’m picturing scenes from one of my favorite books, “Jennifer Government,” where employees’ surnames must match the company they work for. As much as I love writing for TechRepublic (and the people I work with), I would not be happy if I had to change my name to Jack TechRepublic. 

With that in mind, IBM needs to understand that they cannot insist on an intersection of the personal and professional. 

In defense of IBM, it does make sense that that developer might want to use an IBM email address for commits that are directly related to the company that pays him for his work. Clearly, if you are an IBM employee and a maintainer of a driver for IBM hardware, then the twain shall clearly meet.

However, that’s not the issue. The issue is how IBM went about laying this claim. In a world of 24/7 connectivity and a steady stream of breaking news, when a company exhibits behaviors like this, word spreads fast and reputations can be trashed in the blink of an eye. To that end, IBM probably should have either toned down that statement or come out with a follow-up to say they were wrong in insisting this maintainer was an IBM employee, whether they were working on IBM code, personal code, awake or asleep.

Given that good programmers can pretty much walk out of one job and into another, companies would do well to respect the position that puts them in. Because of this, a measure of caution should be taken when the decision to make such demands is made, and Linux kernel developers are a special breed. Linux pretty much powers enterprise businesses and it’s in the best interests of large companies across the globe to keep those developers happy.

Of course, that does not mean they must bow to every whim of kernel developers. That would create an environment that could not be maintained for any length of time. Besides, businesses do pay developers salaries. Unless they don’t.

That’s the tricky part of open source—in some cases, kernel maintainers aren’t paid for their work. Although that’s not the case here, it could very well have been. How would IBM have reacted if they found an employee, who happened to maintain non-IBM code in the Linux kernel, was using their personal email address in commits? Would they go full-on nuclear with their message? Or would they overlook the issue? Because IBM owns Red Hat, does IBM feel like they have the right to exercise some tyrannical power over any employee that commits code to the Linux kernel?

These are questions that should be answered. There’s very often a fine line between personal and professional work when applied to open source. So many developers wear multiple hats—some of which have a company label—and some are adorned with an adorable penguin mascot. 

To confuse the matter even more, sometimes those developers have to switch out those hats throughout the day, even while on company time. When it’s in the best interest of the company for those developers to do so, said company should offer up the necessary leeway to allow the shift between company and “personal” work—especially when that “personal” work directly benefits the company.

Subscribe to TechRepublic’s How To Make Tech Work on YouTube for all the latest tech advice for business pros from Jack Wallen.

Open Source Weekly Newsletter

You don’t want to miss our tips, tutorials, and commentary on the Linux OS and open source applications. Delivered Tuesdays

Sign up today

Also see