I get the feeling, just want to say that it all worked out well (towards "spectacularly well") for me. It's easy to say "for any amount of money" in the abstract, but that job directly and indirectly took me from "relatively poor" to "fatfire-level-of-rich". And didn't _really_ restrict me in any way - I got the written approvals to teach when needed, and contributing to OSS was possible (though there was some red tape).
I'm by no mean advocating that one should ignore the contracts, but I do think you need to look at the larger picture... sometimes it just is overzealous lawyers and not necessarily a bad company to work for.
You went pretty fast from "you are just a cog in the machine and there is no 'you'. Sign here please" to "signing away your soul to the Devil".
I understand the first statement/feeling, and my reply was meant to say that it might be ok to take the risk that "you are just a cog in the machine". As for the latter statement, not sure where you got that one from, there was nothing in the contract that suggested it (and there was nothing evil in the job that I was originally hired for, either - it was code intelligence (code hinting) for PHP).
I'm by no mean advocating that one should ignore the contracts, but I do think you need to look at the larger picture... sometimes it just is overzealous lawyers and not necessarily a bad company to work for.