My CS 404 Thoughts

Today's trial and discussion revolved around one of my biggest fears as a programmer: that the company I work for would own everything I wrote while employed by it. For a company to own the rights to the software I write not only at work, but in my own personal time, is one of the biggest killers of creative thought I can imagine. If a project I worked on at home because I saw a need for it in my own personal computing was automatically owned by my employer, there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever for me to produce anything. During the course of my studies here at BYU I have come up with a couple of ideas for tools that would make my life easier, and it is nice to know that when I build them, I will be the decider of whether to "Open Source" it, or to try and make some money by selling it. It would also be a comforting thing to know that while employed somewhere, I could still contribute to any of the Open Source projects I frequently use. I am a firm supporter of software copyrights (but NOT software patents, which is an entirely different topic), and believe that an employer has every right to prevent their commercial products from being copied or reverse-engineered by their own employees. However, I don't at all like the idea that an employer can have the rights to work done by their employees on their own time and on something totally unrelated to what they do at work. After reading about a situation where this happened I have resolved to read very carefully any contract I sign with any company I ever work for.