I am talking about contributions to open-source projects under the name of the employer. I have signed NDAs with clauses that state that as an employer I am responsible for the maintenance of the internal systems including the bug fixes to whatever project the system depends on, but later there are clauses that prevent me from identifying myself as an individual contributor to these open-source projects, I have to use a company-provided account.
Was a justification given for this? The company doesn't seem to be gaining from keeping the identity of the contributors secret (if they wanted to mask the fact that they were using a particular piece of OSS I could kind-of understand that -- but doesn't seem to be the case here). Is it really as spiteful as "we don't want you to gain personal credit for work we're paying for"?
I can only speculate about the justification for these clauses. The contract was written by a group of 3rd-party lawyers who had little to none knowledge about the open-source community. My only guess is that they wanted the contributions to be tied to the company's name to increase their visibility, as in — "We [the company] contribute to X project(s); love us!" — putting myself in the shows of these lawyers, if an employee leaves, their contributions will stop being tied to the company and they will lose some visibility, that is the only reason I can think of right now. Your guess about "we pay you; credit is for us" also makes sense, they are the company's lawyers after all, they are not working to protect my rights but the company, so I didn't think too much about it when I signed, later I regretted my decision and quit.
