Books equals code?

Suppose you were an author writing books. A publisher wants to publish a novel on a particular subject; a sci-fi novel say. Now imagine that the author will be paid for each month he or she works on the book with a nice pay, but once the book has been written, then it belongs solely to the publisher. The publisher will sell the book for the next 20-30 years and make a bit of money off it each month. The author will not get anything of these money. A mediocre author would -- perhaps -- jump at this. A bestselling author, however, wouldn't. She would only accept writing the sci-fi novel should she get considerate percentage of the earnings. She would know that her value is built by accumulating it in the books she writes because they will throw off a small bit of money each month for 20-30 years. Now imagine you are a programmer at a company. Most programmers happily give over all rights on the code to the company. They happily get their pay each month, and when they get fired or move on, their accumulated value is lost entirely. The paradoxical thing is: most programmers accept this. Some of their worth is in the code they wrote, but since it is entombed in the repository of the company they have access to that worth in their next job. I command this to stop. Now. Here is a set of ideas: First, you could tie the success of the company with your earnings, but be sure that you get something other than salary. It is gone when you leave. Stock options is one way. Or you may be one of the owners. Second, you could ignore the company and write code "in stealth" on the side of the company. When you have a product you could try to shrink-wrap it into something salable. With luck, you can then either get something fun out of it, or a lot of money. Note that many companies disallow such activity. If you are at one such company, I suggest you move on and let them outsource your seat to India. They will be sorry for trying to outsource the system kernel (it always fails). Third, you could have the company release part of their code as open source. This leaves you with a way to take your work with you to another company and with luck you also generate "street credit" in the Open Source community. In other words, you are generating accumulating value you can take with you when you leave. The company can get a feedback loop going on such open sourced software, so it might end up being beneficial to them. Fourth, you can write software and release the software under an open source license. But you only do work on the system by contract. If a company wants tailoring, it is negotiable for a price. They get the best programmer for the job and you back-fit the changes into your code generating even more value in the project. Another path is to take money for support on the code base.