[austincheney]

I have had employers hire me and then not give me work to do leaving me with large swaths of time to work on my unpaid open source that they are using internally. It’s probably an ethical violation to use their office, time, and equipment to work on code they are not paying for (since it’s free and liberally licensed), but they absolutely know I’m doing it.

[nwsm]

Your situation may not be serious enough to care, but you could be fired and the company could claim ownership of all your work, screwing over you and any project with a dependency to your OSS.

[austincheney]

I have gone through something like that before. My first big corporate employer did not claim ownership but they slapped a patent on my first big personal project. Potential for sub licensing was more important than the work itself.

My solution to the concerns of ownership and distribution is to ensure a personal project is publicly disclosed, copyright is released, and the project is known to the employer before agreement of employment. It is typically not in a company’s interest to claim ownership of such projects where there is a maintenance liability and the potential for revenue and protection are unclear.