[AustinW]

I get that this can be generic, and we can discuss this as a open source issue with an employer asserting their rights, but I want to take a more direct approach to the specific situation.

Does a company really think they are able to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage from controlling a continuous integration system? What is the business rationale here?

[_wp3r]

If they do a lot of consulting, they could have heavy third party approval processes or some other consulting workflow structure in the CI that "greatly" improves their customer experience or engagement in the dev process.

I am not sure that there would be a burden on the employer to even prove value though.