My contract requires that anything I develop using University resources, which in practice means potentially anything in my areas of specialisation, the University has some claim on.

It's not entirely unreasonable - imagine someone in Biochemistry developing some drug using University labs etc. and then turning around and selling the formula to a private lab.

But it's the petty bureaucratisation which is infuriating. (And usually the people making the decisions aren't practically qualified.)

While I was working as an assistant researcher three years ago, my contract also considered all research-derived knowledge uni property. In this case, pretty much anything tangentially related to HTTP performance enhancements would have been claimable by them.

It the software is GPL, and you use it for your company/university to do work with, that is a very dubious claim and more likely falsifiable in court.

GPL is a license applied to a work by the copyright owner after (or at the time of) creation. It has nothing to do with authorship of the work and who owns the copyright.

To elaborate, even if GP developed code as part of a GPL project, the copyright owner could prevent him/her from distributing that code to anyone else, whether that distribution occurs under the GPL or any other license.

If you use any (and I mean any) school funded resources for any of your personal projects, yes, they usually have a basis for a claim.

I have a friend who went to Utah for his bachelor's in CS.

I'm not in CS, but my understanding is that the CS dept has a historical relation with the FSF.

Well, that is the result we got from turning Universities from public knowledge centers into private for profit IP accumulating businesses.

It's the standard in many universities and many countries that consider the university your employer if you have a full time equivalent dedication, even if the university only considers you under some kind of stipend or scholarship.

And yes, it's outrageous.

I think this is US specific.

The rules vary by school and state and whether the contributions used school resources or were created as coursework.

Nope, Its the same in Germany too.

Only if it is directly related to your research under office hours and is done solely by your university. If you use the university laptop to do some OS at home it is not, though in the US it could be and usually is.

It's actually the norm in the U.S. ...