281–290 of 478 posts
What rights does a developer have in these cases? Can you get some compensation/damages for the license/copyright violation even if you were giving away the software originally? Can you get more money if they violate the OSS license if you offer the software under a commercial license as well?
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As he said, he did not want to burn his bridges.
That’s a pretty interesting thought experiment. How likely is it to burn bridges with a multibillion dollar corp by taking them to court to protect your IP? They might even respect you for it. Most likely the people working there will move on eventually and especially if they are responsible for IP theft that results in a heavy legal bill. Companies sue each other over ip all the time and then still do business with…
Reminds me of when Apple started providing "smaller size updates" to OS X. I was curious about the details since my doctorate had touched on the topic, so I worked my contacts (I had a few in Apple engineering from the FreeBSD / OS X relationship) and after a few months I got back as answer: "We're using a tool called bsdiff, are you familiar with it?" I was indeed, since I was the author of said tool. (Just to be cl…
Yeah, but did you win the Putnam?
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We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower. Instead, we just pack the uncompressed files together (frequently using normal zip in a no-compression mode) so that we can avoid needing to ask the OS to open and close files for us or examining the contents of a directory, both of which can be kind of startlingly slow (by video game standards) on some common OSes. I…
> We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower. _You_ mightn't but the last three AAA games I worked on do/did. PS5 expectes compressed files, and does HW decompression (ahem, mostly) on the fly.
Ps4 also did the compressed packages by default thing if I remember right. The upside there being ample cpu for decompression such that no compression was never fastest.
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That’s a pretty interesting thought experiment. How likely is it to burn bridges with a multibillion dollar corp by taking them to court to protect your IP? They might even respect you for it. Most likely the people working there will move on eventually and especially if they are responsible for IP theft that results in a heavy legal bill. Companies sue each other over ip all the time and then still do business with…
I don't know much about law, but I wonder what the ballpark out-of-pocket legal costs might look like for an individual going after a large corporation with an IP suit... i.e. how likely is it the corporation could win simply by dragging out proceedings and exhausting your resources / burying you with legal fees?
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>> "that guy is making a mountain out of a molehill, just use re2" That's an odd thing about the tech world, it's accessible. As you get better in different areas you are actually more and more likely to make contact with important people (big names? people who did important stuff?). This can creep up on you if you're not aware what level you're operating at. It can be a small world.
yep. i remember asking a question on google groups about some AppEngine query early on a Saturday morning thinking, "this will never be answered". about 15 minutes later Guido van Rossum answered my question.
It's amazing how often doing this completely bypasses any corporate first-line-support structure in the way, and just puts the email right into the inbox of the line engineers working directly on the product. It's also amazing how quickly those line engineers reply. (It's as if they treat "replying to random messages on the product mailing list" as their highest-priority job. Or maybe it's just that they're technical people, and my questions are usually very nerd-snipe-y, and get them hooked.)
> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?
Almost been there. I was once hired and given some sources to work on by a company, and those were the same exact sources I wrote at another company years before, although my name and all recognizable comments were stripped, save for a few almost invisible traces I left like my initials paired with reserved words to make them appear like directives, pragmas, etc. The guy who had given me the "new" sources was without…
I for one wouldn't be so forgiving. Stripping the author's name from source code is an absolute no-go.
So now they see that their code has been stolen from the previous company, and they're being asked to work on it, what will they do? Refuse to use the code and risk being fired for being too slow? Report the crime and risk being accused of attempted to cover their own tracks? Talk to HR and being hated by one's closest bosses?
I see no way to really win here. At least, not reliably.