It is my understanding that there has never been a case in California where a court has said “OK, your employer owns that open source patch you made at 3am on y

It is my understanding that there has never been a case in California where a court has said “OK, your employer owns that open source patch you made at 3am on your own laptop”. Poking around, Applied Materials, Inc. v. Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment comes to mind; here is a summary: https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/2009/06/ip-alert-new-decision-may-undermine-claims-to-ip__ https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/20... The only public case I know of where a company has been able to claim the open source software someone made in their own time is the Nginx case which is ongoing right now in Russia. [1] I remember a story about someone in the US (not in California) where they were asked by their employer to stop working on open source Perl code in their own spare time, but there was, as I recall, no litigation there. As for myself, I am very careful to make it clear, when signing an “inventions” clause, that I will work on MaraDNS in my own personal time while employed. I also go to a lot of effort to date stamp my open source code, and to only use versions of my open source code written before I signed the “inventions” clause for anything work related. Actually, I prefer working as an independent contractor for employers who do not burden me with an “inventions” clause. [1] The details are different: As I understand it, Igor Sysoev was given permission from his employer to work on nginx while at the job, and the legal stuff didn’t come up for well over a decade after Sysoev left Rambler, and, of course, it’s in Russia, so it’s somewhat different than the “3am commit on one’s own laptop in California” issue.