I encountered such clause in my contracts twice, in France. I'm glad to finally know the reason why, it just looked suspicious to me (and when I asked about it,

I encountered such clause in my contracts twice, in France. I'm glad to finally know the reason why, it just looked suspicious to me (and when I asked about it, each time I was answered: "this is standard contracts"). The two times, I asked to change it. First time I asked to mention that I keep ownership of my opensource projects, since it was what I was doing mainly with my free time. The second time was less obvious, because I was cofounder/CTO, and I didn't really have a distinction between my "work for company" time and "work outside" time. I also was working on a side project meant to become a business. I took it that they wanted me to transfer IP to the company, but didn't want to let the ownership of my other project go as well. So what I asked was to change text to say that company had ownership for all my non opensource code that was effectively used by the company. This gave them ownership of everything I was writing for them while at home, while still securing my ownership on my totally unrelated project (without any ambiguity possible).