81–90 of 242 posts
TFA makes it sound as if the entirety of the blame can be placed on one employee. Sure, his actions do seem to support that view, but then again, Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everybody is violating everybody else's patents Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you meaning it will still be clean room design, whereas this guy also blatantly copied the source code and design files which is a slam dunk lawsuit, hence why no company ever wants to have competitors' IP on their systems.
> Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.
I feel like the granularity of patents is defined more so by where the frontier of knowledge is for a given domain than the patent office (i.e. what is hard but also valuable). But, I also haven’t spent a lot of time with patents
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It's pretty clear what he means. He means that the managers and executives are ok with stealing code.
How many managers need to be in-the-loop with the theft before we can fairly say "the corporation knows"? As far as I'm concerned, even if no managers are aware of it, they should have been aware of it (it's their job to know what their reports are doing) so the corporation should be liable for the theft. Otherwise it's trivial for everybody to play dumb and turn a blind eye to what's going on.
And they will get a slap on the wrist at best. They made billions this is just peanuts.
And they will get a slap on the wrist at best. They made billions this is just peanuts.
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This is the "inevitable disclosure" argument - AKA the idea that the experience is the secret, and thus nobody should ever be allowed to switch employers ever again. For various reasons (notably, the fact that slavery is illegal), we don't accept this in general. You have to show that secrets were copied in full . Employees cannot memorize millions of lines of source, they can only memorize vague architectural detail…
In theory, one can memorize a great deal.. I do agree with you, though.
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> Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. Yes, this happens all the time. > There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming with secrets. This is not a logical conclusion from the above. Hiring for the exp is fine. Hiring for the trade…
> No serious company would do the latter It happens literally all the time: [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/27/anthony-l... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/22/23317502/xiaolang-zhang-p... [3] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-engineer-sentenced... [4] https://apnews.com/article/korea-samsung-china-copycat-semic... [5] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-may-face-difficul...
Think about the large scale conspiracy required to keep something like that secret from an entire company.
I just avoid NVIDIA because they hate Free Software, not for any other reason.
https://github.com/orgs/NVIDIA/repositories
Not to mention tons of other projects that live outside of the main org, contributions to other projects all over the place, etc.
So much hate for free software.
The “I hate Nvidia because all I know is their driver is proprietary” schtick is old.
They crossed the $1T mark in value solely because of the almost completely open source ecosystem (a large portion of which they directly develop and contribute to) that runs on top of their hardware and (yes, proprietary) driver.
They’re not angels but this position is something out of Slashdot circa 2005.
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Bringing knowledge is one thing, which is legal, but stealing source code and design files from your employer to copy it to the systems of their competitor where you now work is a completely different thing which is illegal. Companies want your knowledge, not you bringing proprietary IP from their competitor to work, as they know that's a very expensive lawsuit waiting to happen.
But what if I have an idemic memory?
We live in an imperfect world and solve problems as best we can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bringing knowledge is one thing, which is legal, but stealing source code and design files from your employer to copy it to the systems of their competitor where you now work is a completely different thing which is illegal. Companies want your knowledge, not you bringing proprietary IP from their competitor to work, as they know that's a very expensive lawsuit waiting to happen.
But what if I have an idemic memory?