> It's not about amounts, it's about perception and policies. The idea of selling a product even remotely related to my job description to my current employer just sounds like a whole bag of nasty waiting to drop.
The discussion here relates to open source stuff. You give your company a bypass to the license agreement (attribution requirements, etc) in exchange for $1. That's a small business benefit, and in turn you create a clear papertrail of ownership with consideration. Yes, everyone would do this eyes wide open.
You can set the terms however fits the requirements of all involved. If you leave, they are an open source user like any other. Maybe they are allowed to redistribute without attribution, etc, indefinitely. Maybe it includes giving you the right to say that <employer> is using the package.
You do this when your employer already knows you tinker on open source, and a project is getting serious enough that it deserves to have its IP rights explicitly protected.
> Will they use their vastly larger capital to sue you for it, if indeed it is critical to them, arguing that if you felt it was useful enough to the company to sell it to them then it was part of your job responsibilities to work on it (excepting the case where you did the project prior to starting work at the company). Will you somehow be able to prove that it was done outside of work hours and relied in no way on your confidential knowledge of what the company does?
That's the whole point here-- you demonstrate that the company considered it yours at that point in time, and entered into a license agreement for it.
I have been on both sides of deals like this. Not all employers will do it, but it is a not-unreasonable way to protect everyone's interests and record what the parties considered the ownership to be at the time of employment. I've also sold company-owned code to an employee for $1 and an indefinite license because we didn't want to maintain it anymore.