several posts say talk to an attorney, in detail, when they can READ your contract, and they're right. IANAL. However, since this is the Internet, I want to take this opportunity to point out several substantial flaws in your submission.

0. Posting here and not getting an attorney. Fail.

1. A purely ownership and non-personal right like this, it's very unlikely there's any prohibition against you signing it away. (Unlike, e.g. some noncompetes which are SOMETIMES unenforceable.) Fail.

2. If you sign this when you obviously (and demonstrably - you posted it here!) thought they intended it to mean you had no ownership, the courts will not look kindly on you turning around and saying you don't believe that. That's called 'bad faith'. Even if the contract WAS weak, if it's clear that both parties understood the same intent, usually that's what happens.

And there's a good reason for that. Knowingly signing that when you clearly believe they mean that if you don't intend to carry it through makes you a liar.

Fail.

3. That the faculty, who have a totally different contract, get to keep their work has no bearing on your contract. Fail.

4. The faculty don't even meet the standard you set out - which is 'if you're paid TO develop software' - which they aren't. They're paid to uphold the educational mission of the institution and do their research. The actual software is (at least contractually) secondary.

I'm not telling you not to take the job -

I only see two glimmers of hope here:

- If the UNIVERSITY's contract with NSERC specifies something different, you count point that out to them.

- I don't know if this is in your goalset, but depending on the U, if you WANTED to open source your project (whatever license) the U may allow that - and you MIGHT be able to get them to approve allowing that BEFORE hiring you. YOU will still own none of it. They'll own all the rights to sell a closed source version, etc., and they could un-open-source their future versions. (Which, if you were GPL, no one ELSE could legally do) But they can't exactly 'unlicense' the code they agreed to release.

I realize this is probably not an answer to the OP, because this kind of time (learn Actionscript) is a lot more than really free.

However, to answer the parent - to do applications these days Adobe Flex is preferred to Adobe Flash. And while Adobe Flex Builder isn't free (Eclipse based IDE with GUI Dreamweaver mode) the underlying vanilla SDK/compiler IS free (as in beer, at least)

Perfect for this discussion, the singular thing the free version doesn't come with is the advanced Charting package, but it's totally reasonable to draw arbitrary charts however you want (and indeed, with more customization), it's just slightly less automatic.

The Flex IDE also has a 100% student discount.

My degree was in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in CS, and now I manage a software firm (including hiring)

Mathematicians at a university are smarter, in my experience (dated by about a decade) I don't think this has to fundamentally mean there are no brilliant people in CS - I'd suspect the following mechanism:

CS is often really bad at evaluating students' ability. Possibly partially because they're a quite young educational discipline. Therefore, it's relatively hard to flunk out of CS due to lack of brilliance. (Flunking out from lack of DILIGENCE is different; a CS degree is still a lot of work.) I've seen VERY incompetent people with degrees from all sorts of places...

Math is often easier to flunk out of, and in some cases more likely to be very difficult to get program admission to. Perhaps this is partially because it's an extremely old educational discipline... And being less 'practical' I suspect there's a greater part brilliance and lesser part diligence to getting the degree. (That's not bad - some project management is important in CS!)

So if you take the same pool of candidates and randomize which field they go into, more people will stay in the program and graduate in CS than Math - at least in the admittedly limited subset of universities I've been exposed to. The best will do fine in either, the worst in neither, but a certain class of middle ones will pass in CS if they stick with it, and would fail out of Math.

I think it's also true that being a more practical, commercial discipline, there's simply demand for many more CS degrees, diluting the 'average' brilliance of someone graduating with that degree. I have made no attempt to verify this whatsoever, however.

Yes, I realize someone knows of a school where the math dept is easy and the CS dept is hard. I'm not trying to say this is a law of the universe, only a statistical truth.