I just joined Amazon.com, and they explicitly state that they do NOT own work done on my own time, unless that work is in direct competition with Amazon itself:
"During the course of employment and at the
termination thereof, the Employee shall promptly disclose and deliver over to the Company, without additional
compensation, to the extent that such disclosure could reasonably be expected to be of interest to the Company,
in writing, or in such form and manner as the Company may reasonably require, the following: ... any and all algorithms, procedures or techniques related to the Company's business activities or to the Employee's work with the Company, and the essential ideas and principles underlying such algorithms, procedures or techniques, conceived, originated, adapted, discovered, developed, acquired, evaluated, tested, or applied by the Employee while employed by the Company, whether or not such
algorithms, procedures or techniques are embodied in a computer program...However, the Company recognizes that
the Employee may Conceive and/or Originate certain Products and/or Services which are unrelated to the activities of the Company, unrelated to the planned activities of the Company, and unrelated to any reasonable extension of the activities or planned activities of the Company ("Unrelated Products and/or Services"). The parties therefore agree, the other provisions of this Section 1 notwithstanding, that...any Unrelated Products and/or Services Conceived and/or Originated by the Employee, even while employed by the Company, shall not be considered Disclosure information..."
Amazon's policy is not as liberal as your impression indicates (I work there).
Generally speaking, Amazon is very liberal when it comes to proprietary code you write on your own time. So you can very well put together a startup on the side while you work for them. In fact, people have gotten away with pretty ludicrous things (Infibeam, anyone?) that tread way over to the wrong side of non-competes and basic morality.
If you like open source though, it's really not great. I know people who want to leave for MS for their better open source contribution policies (seriously).
Any open source projects you want to work on in your own time, even if their licenses are non-viral, anything, has to be cleared by a committee - one that is particularly not amenable to passing anything. I've known people at the company who wanted to work on projects in spaces completely way out of the company's current and predictable sphere, and have had the projects rejected. But of course, why approve a project and take on the minute risk of being wrong years down the line, when you can CYA and just deny the request?
tl;dr: If you work at Amazon and write proprietary code on the side that doesn't compete with the company, you're basically in the clear. If you have any interest in contributing to open source, you're SOL.
This is the problem with any generalised "anything you do that might one day compete with the company" criterion. Even if an employer only claims work that an employee does on their own time that relates to any current company activities, there is still the need for an employee to know about the other project, which is hardly likely in a huge company with 100,000s of staff worldwide.
I think the standard should be that things the employee does that are directly related to their own employment are what is covered. It's fair enough for an employer to claim ideas directly related to the project you're being paid to work on, and/or to say that you can't compete in closely related fields to what you're doing for your employer. However, that's a very different thing to counting effectively the entire world of software development, if anything that any part of a large software company does or ever might do could be claimed.
I have worked at Amazon.com and I currently work at Google. The Google policies are much, much better than Amazon's, both in letter and in practice.
The Google policy is not, as this article/discussion implies, a blanket policy where everything you do on your own time belongs to Google. From my employment agreement:
"I understand that the provisions of this Agreement requiring assignment of Inventions to the Company do not apply to any invention which qualifies fully under the provisions of California Labor Code Section 2870 (attached hereto as Exhibit B). I will advise the Company promptly in writing of any inventions that I believe meet the criteria in California Labor Code Section 2870 and not otherwise disclosed on Exhibit A."
You can see the contents of California Labor Code Section 2870 here. It says the essence of what your Amazon agreement says; stuff you develop entirely on your own time and does not compete with the company belongs to you.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...
So far, the two companies sound the same. But the internal policies surrounding this are worlds apart.
At Google, there is a fairly liberal policy around open-sourcing of code that belongs to Google. So code that you work on internally or on 20% time can be open-sourced without much push-back. In my experience, the policy is so favorable to open-sourcing that the primary barriers are technical (disentangling internal code from internal-only dependencies) rather than legal/policy. From this policy we see tons of Google open-source releases, like Protocol Buffers and tcmalloc.
Amazon also has an open-source releasing process. But the culture is so suspicious of open-sourcing that a friend of mine spent literally FIVE YEARS getting a project of his approved for open source release. I am not exaggerating. This is a project he is passionate about and has been working on for that entire time. The project is not proprietary in any way; it's a set of UNIX utilities for piping data around in JSON format instead of flat text, and he (and a community inside Amazon) wrote a bunch of useful transformations that made it like UNIX on steroids. Clearly not software that competes with Amazon.
Then there is the question of working on non-open-source software on your own time, because (for example) you're trying to do some business on the side. Now if you can show that your side project does not compete with Google according to the California statute above, then you're legally protected and it belongs to you. But ideally you want to avoid going to court at all. What you want is an assurance from Google that it won't attempt to claim ownership of your work. So there is a process called the IARC (Invention Assignment Review Committee) where you can submit a description of your work, and if your submission is accepted, you get an assurance from Google that it won't try to claim ownership of it.
This is a strict improvement over the Amazon situation, because you have the same legal protections you had already, but additionally you can preemptively clear the rights to any work you're doing on the side.
So in my view, Google has some of the best policies related to open sourcing of any company I've ever worked at, and certainly better than Amazon's.
Thanks for that information. It is interesting that what really matters isn't the actual terms of the agreement, but rather the policies that are implemented by the most powerful party in the agreement.
"During the course of employment and at the termination thereof, the Employee shall promptly disclose and deliver over to the Company, without additional compensation, to the extent that such disclosure could reasonably be expected to be of interest to the Company, in writing, or in such form and manner as the Company may reasonably require, the following: ... any and all algorithms, procedures or techniques related to the Company's business activities or to the Employee's work with the Company, and the essential ideas and principles underlying such algorithms, procedures or techniques, conceived, originated, adapted, discovered, developed, acquired, evaluated, tested, or applied by the Employee while employed by the Company, whether or not such algorithms, procedures or techniques are embodied in a computer program...However, the Company recognizes that the Employee may Conceive and/or Originate certain Products and/or Services which are unrelated to the activities of the Company, unrelated to the planned activities of the Company, and unrelated to any reasonable extension of the activities or planned activities of the Company ("Unrelated Products and/or Services"). The parties therefore agree, the other provisions of this Section 1 notwithstanding, that...any Unrelated Products and/or Services Conceived and/or Originated by the Employee, even while employed by the Company, shall not be considered Disclosure information..."