Joel is both asserting that a particular state of affairs presently exists that quite likely doesn't--specifically that employers have a strong rather than tenu

Joel is both asserting that a particular state of affairs presently exists that quite likely doesn't--specifically that employers have a strong rather than tenuous legal claim to all side projects produced by their developers due to the vagueness of the relatedness clause of the California law and the contracts incorporating it--and also attempting to convince his readers, most of whom are developers, that this is entirely appropriate and that they should just accept it as a normal consequence of salaried employment. This really does change my opinion of both Joel and FogCreek, and certainly for the worse. I wonder, did FogCreek actually prevent Ted Unangst from contributing to OpenBSD as a side project while he was with them? If so, that's horrible. And how much have FogCreek, StackOverflow, and other companies that seek to greedily arrogate the entire creative output of their employees benefited from open source software began and continued as the very side projects this blog post cautions against? Utterly hypocritical. I second the call of another poster: we need a professional association (union) of the kind that lawyers, doctors, and dentists have. IEEE and ACM could easily function as such, and in fact, they already provide many of the same practice standardization and continuing education functions that other professional associations do. All that's missing is the rent-seeking behavior to ensure we earn what we're worth and keep employers like Joel honest.