Dilemma

I have a bit of a dilemma here, so I'm going to take this space to vent, and hopefully think things through a bit.

Up til now, I've been working my new job without a contract or agreement of any sort. It's been the source of a bit of amusement as I'd regularly pester people at work about the need for one, and there'd always be some reason for not having it. Well, now I'm kinda wishing it had stayed that way.

You see, there are at least two problems with my contract, both of which I've recently discussed with my boss. The first is that there's no provision in the contract for me leaving of my own accord. Usually in these contracts, there's something about the agreement being "at will" and that either party can terminate the contract at any time for any reason. Not so with this contract. There's gory detail about how they can sever the relationship, but nothing about my rights. Of course, there's nothing to explicitly stop me from quitting should I so choose, but I suppose that if my employers wanted to be jerks, they could sue me or something. I'm not overly worried about this point, it's more amusing than anything.

The thing that is frosting my Cheerios, however, is a clause that more or less states that my employer claims the rights to anything I create in the world of computers or computing, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with my job. Basically, if I were to write a piece of software, they own it, regardless of whether I wrote it as a part of my employment or in my own free time using my own equipment. Now this strikes me as a bit of slavery. Basically they're saying that I don't have free time in which I can do anything I please. Well, I can, but if I do anything that they find interesting, they reserve the right to take it from me. Which sucks, because I do like to noodle around with software, and I've some ideas of things I'd like to write.

When I brought this up to my boss, his response was pretty close to, "tough". He feels that it is my company's right to take my creations, since they're paying my salary. I got him to agree that I can keep any of my recreational pieces as long as they don't pertain to work, but one of the things I'm thinking of writing would be very helpful to someone in my profession in general, and he said that they would take that out of my hands.

So, now I'm stuck. The project I'd really like to work on is out of bounds, probably forever because I'm sure that my next employer will have the same crappy clause in the contract. And as I've been thinking about other things which interest me, it occurs to me that there would be enough things about them that they could become interested in those projects as well, if not in whole, then in part enough to render the remainder of the software useless. How the heck do I get the freedom to work on the projects I'd like to work on without the fear of it all being taken away from me on a whim? Do I just give up and get other hobbies? I'm angry and confused at this point, and I'm not sure when I'll get around to signing my contract at this point.