One of the posters there suggested crossing out stuff and, in effect, changing the contract, then signing it. What naivete.

Right. I recently (< 3 years) had the "opportunity" to sign a similar contract (I don't remember the one previous to that), and if a corporation with more than a handful of employees has a boilerplate document like that they are not going to change it for you even if you are God or Dennis Ritchie.

At the time, of course, when I raised the issue that they were in effect making me their slave, they said "Oh, we'd never actually *enforce* it, it's there just in case." (Right, as if those oral assurances would mean anything.) Sign the contract as written or you're not employed there. And that kind of contract is almost universal except for those relatively few firms that are Open-Source friendly.

(Actually, I do know of one other type of exception - through some sort of bureaucratic snafu at a former employer, a coworker actually never signed an employment contract. I don't think he ever thought about the problems he might have had, if he'd ever had to go on disability or unemployment, if that ever came about. I suppose perhaps the employer paying him, and paying the employer portion of the social security, would have been de facto evidence of an implied contract, but that's another one I wouldn't like to really stress test.)

Best I could come up with was posting code under a pseudonym, but then you get into the problem of "what if the company still finds out" (I mean, really, if Ben suddenly stops posting but then Sam starts posting in a similar vein, and if they were actually looking for that type of thing, Ben gets his head handed to him), and of proving that it's really you posting it.

I haven't done much tinkering or posting of code since I wrote a simple communications library for Turbo Pascal (which, alas, had some embarrassing bugs that were only pointed out to me years later.) I don't *think* my current employer has code-nazi's roaming the Net for contractual violations; I'd feel free to post code and do open-source stuff. But if I ever was called into my manager's office and read the riot act, there would be only two choices.