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Comment by sylware | Hacker News Reader

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.

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That is not correct; assuming you are not using an employer’s equipment on employer’s time, and/or working on what the employer pays you to do for them or are working on something that is competing and a few other reasonable caveats.

It’s actually quite reasonable and logical.

https://french-business-law.com/french-legislation-art/artic...

As far as I was told, this is not enough, you have to add extra legal care, even more if you are on an 'executive' type job contract, and you have to double that if there is "too much" connection/"look-a-like", between the software at work and the open source software you contribute to "at home".

On an french executive like contract, the boundary between "at home" and "at work" is very, very blurry.

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.

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