[jarjoura]

"no conflict of interest" is basically meaningless if your day job is writing software. These clauses you sign are quite broad in what that scope of conflict could be.

Every company I've worked for has had very explicit rules that say, you must get written permission from someone at some director or VP level sign off on your "side project," open source or not.

You might want to check your company guidelines around this just to make sure you're safe.

[kyrra]

Side projects that aren't a conflict of interest when working at Google is rather limiting. Likely less so for small companies.

[yalok]

Not really, in my personal experience and per my friends, most of big companies are pretty lenient about it, except for Apple.