If they're a contributor rather than the BDFL of an open source project, it might not be possible for them to fix style inconsistencies, or do much about design problems. It's not always clear exactly who wrote what without going through the versioning logs. Of course, that also means that an open source project might not be the best thing to give to an interviewer as example code, unless you wrote a significant percentage of it personally.
Oh I am with icefox. Proof: when asking for code submitted from people without public open source credentials, people will actually send in uncommented code!! I mean there are two issues here - knowing the right thing to do and being too sloppy to do it, and not even realising what the right thing to do is. shake head
As to the OP - if a company doesn't value your O/S contributions, and if those contributions are indeed valuable according to your O/S peers, just don't work for that company. Do you want to have a career with people who can't reliably judge good code?
When I ask for code they usually send a project they wrote entirely, a file, or a class. I try to stay within the code they told me they had control over.
