This came up a while back, and I feel your pain. That Java job I told you about? All the Java and C++ code now belongs to Quest, who bought my employer. And I did some good work on ING Direct (USA), but I can't show that to you, either.
My wife once bought a bunch of postcards from a printer to promote her business as a photographer. Right on their price list was a charge for a credit waiver. basically, every postcard had to have a small "Printed by FooCorp 1-800-888-8888" on it. If you didn't want that, you paid extra.
I have reached the point where I feel the same way about the code I write. Naturally, nobody can see trade secrets. But if there's a portion of the code that is not a trade secret, perhaps a Rails or jQuery plugin that gets developed along the way, I want that open sourced. If the answer is "No, we want to own everything 100%," I need to make extra money to make up for the fact that I am going to go dark, just as that printer needs to charge extra money to make up for the lost advertising opportunity.
Our employment contracts actually require us to open source everything our hackers build (except some client-specific configurations or templates of course)
My wife once bought a bunch of postcards from a printer to promote her business as a photographer. Right on their price list was a charge for a credit waiver. basically, every postcard had to have a small "Printed by FooCorp 1-800-888-8888" on it. If you didn't want that, you paid extra.
I have reached the point where I feel the same way about the code I write. Naturally, nobody can see trade secrets. But if there's a portion of the code that is not a trade secret, perhaps a Rails or jQuery plugin that gets developed along the way, I want that open sourced. If the answer is "No, we want to own everything 100%," I need to make extra money to make up for the fact that I am going to go dark, just as that printer needs to charge extra money to make up for the lost advertising opportunity.