Campers, what are your thoughts about Joel's take on developers side projects?

I just came across his blog post, if not mistaken, he’s saying that side projects that we do on our own time, vacation or at home, the COMPANY or EMPLOYER should have the copyright to it?

Please enligthen me on this one if I do understand it differently. But frankly it kinda sucks if that would really happen. Esp like FCC teaching students via doing projects. :smirk:

This is the link if anythone can’t find it for some reason. Afaik, he’s the co-founder of Stackoverflow, and have been blogging since the early times of the internet.

Haven’t read it yet but if that was true i’d tell them to f*c! right off.

Gonna give it a read now :angry:

whoa this is an eye opening read.

Need time to digest and understand it.

Still angry though grrrrr

Yeah same here, but I thought posting it here and to hear other campers thought on this especially those who’ve been coding for quite some time.

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He’s not saying that the employers should have the copyrights to your side projects, but that they probably already do. If they really wanted to, they may be able to try and sue you and maybe win in court. The blog post is more a caution to software engineers to be aware of that and to know what’s written in your contract and what company policy is on side projects.

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This is different for each employer, state, or country.

Read the terms of your employment carefully :slight_smile:

Sounds more like you need to get a solicitor to look over the contract from he’s saying

My teaching job for next year actually has a clause that implies they own anything I produce that is related to my job.

Since I also write software that I use to make my job easier, I got them to clarify that while they might own any English teaching resources I make, they don’t own any software side projects. Since they are not actually in the software game, they were happy to wash their hands of any side projects I make.

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