[austincheney]

Working on your hobby at work is the dream so long as it’s not stolen from you and bastardized.

The greatest protection is a hyper restrictive license like AGPLv3.

One thing a company can do to lock it up is to extend the application in a novel way and then slap an interim patent application on it while investing an actual patent application. The only protection from this is to ensure new features are disclosed outside the company, but be careful not to violate a confidentiality clause with your employer.

Keep the source control outside your employer. If they want to extend the application internally they need to clone it to a different repository. Do not delete or abandon that original external source control.