Keep personal open-source work on your own time and equipment, separate from company code

Free. Read employment-contract intellectual-property clauses when joining. Separate personal projects from company work even if sharing a computer is convenient.

Work created to perform an employer's tasks is a work made in the course of employment. Ordinarily the author owns copyright, while the employer has priority use within its business and the author may not authorize equivalent third-party use for 2 years. Two categories differ: engineering designs, software and similar works mainly created using the employer's material and technical resources with the employer assuming responsibility; and works assigned to the employer by contract. For these, the author retains only attribution. Material and technical resources include equipment, internal networks and business data. Inventions made in performing assigned tasks or mainly using employer resources are service inventions; both the patent-application right and resulting patent belong to the employer. Chinese law applies.

Software is expressly named in the employer-owned category, so programmers seldom fall into the ordinary author-owned category with a 2-year employer priority. “Written after work” can still count as mainly created with company resources if company computers, networks or business data were used. Keep personal projects on your own machine, outside company repositories and apart from company business.

NPC Standing Committee (2020). Copyright Law, 2020 revision, Article 18. http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c2/c30834/202011/t20201119_308796.html; NPC Standing Committee (2020). Patent Law, 2020 revision, Article 6. http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c2/c30834/202011/t20201119_308800.html