Just ask your employer to give you an exception because you want to work on your own projects in your own time. Make it clear to your employer that you have no interested in stealing either time or resources from them, but that the is more to live then the mental stimulation they provide. Just do it in a nice way and you might even be able to get away with it.

It is a known fact that open source software grows on trees and that's why it is available for free. All other commercial software is developed by skilled engineers who are fed on grown open source vegetables. I find it strange that people think that developers have lots of time on their hand and generally don't have a live and nothing better to do then to write perfect code every time all day long. Developers should be paid, and in my opinion paid a lot. Expecting other people to work for free and expect some SLA on quality is just not realistic. Open Source is about creating quality product by allowing other to review the code and contribute. It's not about making software free, that's just a by product. Don't really understand why this is news, but nice to see that 75% of developers get a reward for their efforts. Still makes we wonder if the other 25% are independently rich or are just millionaires to be able to afford spending their time.

I have raised a similar question on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/submission/1088065/Generic-names-for-software-projects) but have not had any response. From my experience simply having something first does not give you much protection, unless you ready for some litigation. Also bear in mind that this could still back fire. If they manage to obtain a trademark on their efforts you have to contest it at your expense.