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Comment by sylware

10 hours ago

It is even worse in France: if you code open source "on the side" of you work, at home, the company which employs you may claim the copyrights of it. I had to add explicit exclusion of this claim of copyrights in my job contracts to protect my personal work.

That was a few years back, dunno if that was fixed.

AFAIK it's the same in the USA, that's why one of the first questions when interviewing with a company is to ask them about their moonlighting policy if you do want to work on a side project.

  • > AFAIK it's the same in the USA

    It varies by state in the USA. Some states have strong protections for work you do "on your own time, on your own equipment, that isn't connected to your work." Others, not so much...

This is common in North America too. In Canada, people really should be going through their personal projects and getting a moonlighting clause added before they sign any employment agreements. Employment has gotten tough so a lot of juniors aren’t doing this with their first jobs and we’ll start to see the ramifications of that in about five or ten years.