Does your employer own your side projects?
There’s a surprising amount of misinformation out there about whether software companies own the work that a programmer does in their spare time.
From my answer to the question on answers.onstartups.com:
Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.
Read the whole thing here:
If I'm working at a company, do they have intellectual property rights to the stuff I do in my spare time?
Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!
You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.
I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracking and software development tool, Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off if you’re stuck on Subversion, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.
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