Ideas get buried
The people closest to real problems often notice better workflows first. Blanket approval rules turn that advantage into silence.
For independent makers, software builders, and dreamers
Build under your own name.
Right to Build is the idea that workers should be able to publish personal apps, paid tools, software, and creative products without hiding behind permission slips, as long as they do not use company secrets, company systems, or company time.
The movement
Right to Repair, but for people who build software.
Right to Repair says useful things should not be trapped behind closed gates. Right to Build applies that same instinct to the people who make products for a living.
A job should not become a claim on every app, tool, game, workflow, or paid project someone creates on their own time with their own resources.
Case
Why this matters
The next useful product is often born after hours.
Some contracts are written so broadly that a developer, designer, engineer, analyst, or operator has to ask before releasing almost anything that might someday make money. That does not just protect companies. It can quietly stop useful things from existing.
Ownership gets blurry
A paycheck buys assigned work. It should not buy every unrelated product someone imagines outside the job.
The world gets less
Tools never launch, tiny companies never start, and new categories never get tested because permission is easier to deny than define.
Principles
Freedom to build needs guardrails, not a gag order.
Own your off-hours work
People should be able to create, publish, sell, and maintain personal products made outside assigned duties and outside company systems.
Protect confidential work
Trade secrets, customer data, private roadmaps, source code, designs, and unreleased internal work stay protected.
Define conflicts clearly
A real conflict should be specific and understandable before someone builds. Vague industry overlap should not be enough.
Allow public credit
Builders should not have to hide behind faceless storefronts. A personal brand is part of how independent work earns trust.
The Right
Plain language
A practical right to make, publish, and be known for your work.
Right to Personal Building and Publication
An individual should be free to independently create, publish, distribute, sell, license, support, and publicly identify with a personal software product, app, digital tool, creative work, or technical service.
That freedom applies when the work is built without the employer's confidential information, protected intellectual property, private customer data, company systems, or assigned working time.
A company can restrict a real conflict when the conflict is specific, written clearly, and tied to assigned work or protected information. It should not claim broad ownership over curiosity, skill, public knowledge, or unrelated work created with personal resources.
Boundaries
This is not a pass to take from work.
No company secrets
Private code, data, roadmaps, designs, customer information, and internal processes stay protected.
No disguised employment
Assigned work remains company work. The right covers independent products built separately.
No vague veto
If a company says there is a conflict, the conflict should be concrete enough to write down.
The default should be permission to build, with clear limits where harm is real.
Join
Help make independent building normal.
The movement needs builders, founders, employees, lawyers, investors, and company leaders willing to say that personal products should not die in private approval queues.