Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> You'd be hugely surprised at how literally some states in the US
> interpret contracts. I live in (anti-employee) Florida, and a friend of
> mine here in Florida was advised by his lawyer to not work for Linux for
> the next 6 months because his former employer had a 6 month
> anti-compete on any Linux work. His lawyer said he'd likely lose the
> case if he did Linux and his old employer sued.
>
> Meanwhile, in California, that kind of non-compete is illegal.

It would almost certainly be unenforceable in the EU (certainly in the UK where I am) in most situations. However, that doesn't mean an employer couldn't try and enforce it, thus tying the person up in legal machinations for a while.
Put another way, many people couldn't afford to be right and have the law on their side !

At my local(ish) LUG, I recall a while ago one member telling us that the university he worked for had the same sort of clause - they considered that they held copyright in any code he wrote even if written at home, in his own time, on his own computer.

However, on the employers side, consider the difficulty of determining when someone worked on a bit of code. It would be relatively easy for someone to work on code as part of their job, then claim they did it at home in their own time. So being objective, it's not hard to see why an employer would take such a stance.