Day job conflict of interest?

#1 The only reasons they would have to do so is if you:

1. Used Torque with the intent to distribute through another party other then GG.

2. You use code from Torque to further another project that is not itself based on Torque code.

#2 It's MUCH more likely that your employer could lay claim to your personal work.

When I started at the current job, they wanted me to sign all sorts of releases saying that any creative work I do while employed here, belongs to the company. I told em to stuff themselves.

Check your employee manual ;)

#3 Ed & Labrat are right, and Ed's scenario is a bigger risk for you. Double check your terms of employment with your employer. If there is no *explicit* grab for your free-time output in your contract, then you have no feduciary responsibility, and will be fine. But it is *very* common for software industry employers to have right-of-first-refusal written in to contracts.

#4 I hate this practice. An employer claiming rights to something you've spent time on at work, yes, that's understandable, but to want to get their hands on anything you do at home, with your own PC and your own development tools.. ick.

It just leads to developers being too wary of doing personal development, which ultimately costs the employer in my mind. My hobby development gives me so many ideas and teaches me new tricks that I can use in my daytime job, where I don't have the freedom to play around.

#5 be much more scared of you "day job" trying to lay claim to anything you come up with. If they find even a single email or link to something related to work you are doing in your "spare" time, which if you were a good employee you would not have any "spare" time :) On a work computer you are screwed because they probably have much more time/money resources to sue your ass than you have to defend or counter sue.

Tips:

never store ANYTHING of a personal nature on a "employers" computer. Not just source, or word docs of designs but also EMAILS's and your browser stores copies of everything you post on a web forum in a cache most of the time.

never use an "employers" computer for anything of a personal nature, post on "spare" time forums, downloading stuff from work on your "break" etc, can give them ammuntion to hit you with.

never use your own equipment for work! I know of at least TWO examples of someone taking work home and having an employer try and lay claim to all the creative work on that computer just because the files were in the same directory. they even tried to lay claim to some of the commercial software this person was using and claimed that their payments to him mean they owned the license to the animation software because he bought it to work on their project, problem was the contract was way to vague and was written to be flexible for them and inflexible for him. I don't know how this ended, but he ended up moving out of town because of it! I assume he lost everything.

When I was contracting art and animation, I kept all my clients work 100% physically separate from each others and my personal work. I did their work on their equipement, computers or disks, and made 100% damn sure that the contracts were not fishy.

The best way to do this is to work of removable storage. Keep each clients/employers assets and intellectual property completely separate on disks, etc.

Or only use a client/employers equipment for their work and use your own or separate equipement for your work.

#6 Tom,

The Torque is being used by many game developer employees in their off time. It is actually a big contingent of our contributing community members.

There is no problem on the GG side if you do this, but you may want to check with your employer to make sure they do not care if you are doing so.

I belive that what an employee does in his spare time is no business of the employer, but many employers do not see it that way. However, this is philosophical discussion we can have at a later date. For now, in order to protect yourself, just ask:)

Jeff Tunnell GG

#7 Thanks for all the advice. I remember some very loose wording about not going to work for a direct competitor for a period of 2 to 3 years ( which sounded strange for a game company ), but nothing in particular about off-hours creative work. I'll check it out... thanks. Tom

#8 Ouch.. Non-Competitive agreement.

#9 Tom, what state do you live in, here in GA those non-compete agreements are worthless, we are a "right to work state". Non-compete agreements hold more legal water in some of the more socialist states.

#10 I'm in Texas. We make racing games and they just don't want us to go to another developer making racing games... which i don't plan on doing anyway. We have several past employees which moved on to the other companies in town without incident. Still the wording is loose enough that i figure they could try to keep someone from working in gaming industry if they really wanted to. Tom

#11 Here in California they are pretty worthless too. Don't know about Texas. In any case, they are very unlikely to do anything except under special circumstances. For instance, if you have detailed knowledge of all future plans of the company (director level or higher) and go to work for a DIRECT competitor (ie, someone making racing games very similar to the games you make now), then they might...Otherwise they want to avoid it because suing developers who leave the company is not a good way to attract new developers in the future. Unless they view you as somehow vital to the continued survival of the company, or believe you illegally stole some company IP, you almost certainly won't be sued.