[m0nty]

www.novacaster.com is a CMS I coded from scratch in Perl, in 1999-2000. I was told by my boss it would be released as open source, but that never happened. When I left the job, he told me he would be "retaining full rights to the Novacaster CMS code", etc, and there was basically nothing I could do about it. I'd recommend getting a lawyer involved, although even that means nothing if you don't have the funds to fight a court case.

More recently, my strategy has been to say nothing to employers about side projects. Assign the rights to your friends, if you have to, just in case they do find out.