"I recently went through the approval process to contribute to a project on my own time."
Which I took to mean he needed formal approval to contribute to some external open source project on his own time, completely outside of work and unrelated to his work project. Which is pretty bonkers.
Of course if you're pulling open source in to your projects it is wise to have that reviewed first, though I have to admit that at my current job I'm slightly annoyed at the formality of things like having to apply to get Apache 2.0 licensed code brought into our Android project when the Android SDK itself is under exactly the same license as the OSS project. However, I also understand that I have a far better understanding of the implications of various open source licenses than Joe Average programmer guy, so I "get it".
"I recently went through the approval process to contribute to a project on my own time."
Which I took to mean he needed formal approval to contribute to some external open source project on his own time, completely outside of work and unrelated to his work project. Which is pretty bonkers.
Of course if you're pulling open source in to your projects it is wise to have that reviewed first, though I have to admit that at my current job I'm slightly annoyed at the formality of things like having to apply to get Apache 2.0 licensed code brought into our Android project when the Android SDK itself is under exactly the same license as the OSS project. However, I also understand that I have a far better understanding of the implications of various open source licenses than Joe Average programmer guy, so I "get it".