NCAs are pretty commonplace. IANAL, but I don't think I'd sweat it too much, you'd think it would go pretty much without saying, but the primary purpose of these is to make sure folks don't use the employer's resources and accumulated knowledge to either start a rival business using their proprietary information, or to help a competitor gain an advantage in what would amount to industrial espionage. I highly doubt any employer would go after one of their employees for doing some unrelated work on the side, but would have a pretty big problem if an employee was double-dipping by bringing that work into the office to "catch-up". There's also the common element of the company "owning" all inventions an employee conceives while working for them, I suspect it would be hard (if not impossible) to assert ownership of any innovations that were completely unrelated and weren't conceived of using the employer's resources. Again, this is to make sure that if an employee has a brilliant flash of an idea while working, that he can't just quit and go into business for himself, or even just hold good ideas relating to the job and not feed them back into the system for product or process improvement. A few months' lag time helps ensure that the employee's knowledge of proprietary projects will be largely obsolete by the time they're eligible to hire on with a competitor, and the employer would likely only know about and pursue a remedy under an NCA if something egregious happened. I highly doubt they would waste resources spying on former employees' current situations unless they had reason to believe someone was not only violating the NCA, but sharing secrets with a rival (even something like sharing a product rollout timetable or projects that they were developing).
Just a quick point.
UNIX=!free and it predates Microsoft operating systems by a pretty substantial span of time, and it's not a consumer desktop OS.
BeOS=!free and kind of had a dearth of software developed for its platform
OS|2=!free and it's basically a fork of NT from when IBM & Microsoft decided to take their respective marbles and go home when their collaboration fell apart. IBM didn't market it anywhere near as aggressively as Microsoft marketed NT.
Mac=!free and the hardware has typically carried a ludicrously high price tag, while the selection of software is on the sparse side (most comp stores I've been in have the usual half-dozen full aisles of Win-PC software, to one-half of an aisle dedicated to Mac software).
Linux=free, but its day isn't over yet. It's getting closer to that asymptote of "being ready for the consumer desktop", which is where folks like Shuttleworth want it to be, and if Canoical was to get more aggressive in marketing k/ubuntu to the masses, who knows what could happen? Percent by meager fraction of a percent, whatever market share ubuntu has today was achieved at what's probably a negligible cost-per-percent compared to the billions of marketing dollars Microsoft has spent hollowing-out a solid foothold in the marketplace over the past 20+ years. That's if you consider services like Shipit to be "advertising".
Any estimates as to how much Microsoft spent trying to convince the public to buy Vista over the past year? And what's its overall market share is? I have my doubts that its shareholders like to think about such things...
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NCAs are pretty commonplace. IANAL, but I don't think I'd sweat it too much, you'd think it would go pretty much without saying, but the primary purpose of these is to make sure folks don't use the employer's resources and accumulated knowledge to either start a rival business using their proprietary information, or to help a competitor gain an advantage in what would amount to industrial espionage. I highly doubt any employer would go after one of their employees for doing some unrelated work on the side, but would have a pretty big problem if an employee was double-dipping by bringing that work into the office to "catch-up". There's also the common element of the company "owning" all inventions an employee conceives while working for them, I suspect it would be hard (if not impossible) to assert ownership of any innovations that were completely unrelated and weren't conceived of using the employer's resources. Again, this is to make sure that if an employee has a brilliant flash of an idea while working, that he can't just quit and go into business for himself, or even just hold good ideas relating to the job and not feed them back into the system for product or process improvement. A few months' lag time helps ensure that the employee's knowledge of proprietary projects will be largely obsolete by the time they're eligible to hire on with a competitor, and the employer would likely only know about and pursue a remedy under an NCA if something egregious happened. I highly doubt they would waste resources spying on former employees' current situations unless they had reason to believe someone was not only violating the NCA, but sharing secrets with a rival (even something like sharing a product rollout timetable or projects that they were developing).
Just a quick point. UNIX=!free and it predates Microsoft operating systems by a pretty substantial span of time, and it's not a consumer desktop OS. BeOS=!free and kind of had a dearth of software developed for its platform OS|2=!free and it's basically a fork of NT from when IBM & Microsoft decided to take their respective marbles and go home when their collaboration fell apart. IBM didn't market it anywhere near as aggressively as Microsoft marketed NT. Mac=!free and the hardware has typically carried a ludicrously high price tag, while the selection of software is on the sparse side (most comp stores I've been in have the usual half-dozen full aisles of Win-PC software, to one-half of an aisle dedicated to Mac software). Linux=free, but its day isn't over yet. It's getting closer to that asymptote of "being ready for the consumer desktop", which is where folks like Shuttleworth want it to be, and if Canoical was to get more aggressive in marketing k/ubuntu to the masses, who knows what could happen? Percent by meager fraction of a percent, whatever market share ubuntu has today was achieved at what's probably a negligible cost-per-percent compared to the billions of marketing dollars Microsoft has spent hollowing-out a solid foothold in the marketplace over the past 20+ years. That's if you consider services like Shipit to be "advertising". Any estimates as to how much Microsoft spent trying to convince the public to buy Vista over the past year? And what's its overall market share is? I have my doubts that its shareholders like to think about such things...