Is it ethical to keep a copy of the code or designs you did for your employer, for your reference?

OK, I was contracting in my previous life so I've seen these issues pop up many times before. Here's few words.<p>A) is illegal. You have no ownership of ANY code or IP that you work on at the company that employs you. That's what they're paying you for, after all.<p>B) is also illegal. Unless the company in question has open sourced their code and allows anyone to use it under some kind of a BSD-like license, you have absolutely no right to use that code or IP.<p>Not only are both of these cases illegal, they're also highly unethical. Also, if you're forming a company around someone else's IP, you're gonna crash and burn.<p>When I worked as a contractor, I would use my own libraries to save me some time but before I used them, I notified the management that I was using them and told them that I own the code and that I give them full right to use it without any licensing fees and I also told them I would use them on my other contracting jobs. They always accepted these stipulations an I've never had any problems. They loved the fact that I was not wasting my time and their money re-implementing the wheel and that I was solving their problems in record time. The key is to be open and put it all on the table before you start working.<p>Also, after I'd finish working on a project and if I was using my own computer, I'd wipe my computer clean of all of their code. I would do that on the last day of my job and I ALWAYS made sure that someone from the management was there to witness it. Sure, that might be going overboard but trust me... it's worth it. It shows them that you care about these sorts of things and it also makes sure that they won't have a strong case if they ever decide to sue you down the road because you end up inventing something amazing that's in their marketspace or you end up working for competition.

if the code is a crystallisation of their business idea then using it again is equivalent to re-using their business idea and i think that is highly un-ethical. if you are talking about reusing some CSS templates and changing the colors - meh. personally, i err on the side of caution and never take work with me from one company to another - often i can condense 6 months of learn-by-doing into a couple of weeks of do-over since it is the overall direction and knowing what is definitely wrong that saves time. /note: i'm a scientist not a programmer but i think the same situations apply

It may or may not be illegal or ethical, but it is rarely useful. I used to keep most of the code I've written for employers over the years, but I never once looked at it.

What agreements have been made with the employer? Hire an intellectual property lawyer to read and discuss the implications of any written contracts and agreements made with the employer.

Perhaps you can use your ideas but certainly not your code.<p>I managed to open-source some parts of my code (basically some generic libraries) under a very liberal license and to reuse it in other companies. Not without agreement with the employers, of course.

well it is certainly illegal ... ethics are fudged... using the source code or work derived from the code is certainly unethical (i think) because your code was paid by the employer..<p>but the actual idea? well where would you guys classify this? i think the actual idea unless protected by a patent is open.. also a lot of companies put a no-compete clause forbidding working for another company in the same domain ... (even though in some countries thats against the law)

Both are unethical and NEVER acceptable. Run, don't walk, the other way from those who rationalize this behavior.<p>(Why is it that when it comes to ethics, what was once clear cut is now "fuzzy"?)