This was an amazing read. One of my favorite memories in college was building a spreadsheet in Java (some of the guts were there) in third semester CS.
I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
261–270 of 565 posts
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#262Best quote: "People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!” This is so true. People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a…
And I was called a racist 25 years ago when I said, “like, our engineering school is, like, crawling with Chinese nationals.” We said like a lot on the 90s.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. Back in my day this was called "competition" and worked for the consumer, not against them. I find the espionage factor to be theatrical hogwash trotted out by the corporate types. We americans love competition, right? Stfu and compete.
You're missing a huge part of this: The "competition" you think you're referring to had, you know, actual rules. Sending people to get jobs at a rival, and steal all of their internal documents and trade secrets, is illegal in most countries.
Perhaps we should reframe how intellectual property works to make secrecy no longer desirable and allow industries that rely on "trade secrets" to realign naturally.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but if we speculate as to the invalidity of the explicitly published license, we basically can't use any foss code on GitHub. Any reasonable person can expect that the MIT license on this code is valid and authorized by the rightsholder. Did Uber or Box explicitly agree to release it under an foss license? Is it the author's personal individual copyright made on personal hardware outside of work location/time? D…
"It's easiest and safest to assume that property is not stolen" is a parallel construction of your argument. You can assume whatever you want but the cops may not be very impressed. There are a lot of polite fictions in law, and this is one of them. If you had no reasonable way of knowing that a license was invalid (or property was stolen), the judge is probably going to be sympathetic, but the property will still ge…
I'm not talking about this code in particular - I am talking about all code presumably written by individuals and posted on GitHub with a LICENSE file saying it's free software.
It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie.
This case is no different.
Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the repo claims. It is unreasonable to assume that the license file in the repo is false; nothing available to us supports this assumption.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code is MIT licensed. Anyone is legally allowed to upload MIT licensed code to GitHub, it's free software and may be freely redistributed.
It’s alarming because, in my experience, anything you write for an employer is intellectual property of the company. Unless he wrote that Box demo all on his own time and his own equipment completely outside of work, or Box has some abnormal contract with their employees, he can’t just slap an MIT license onto it and call it open source. I worked with a few people who were successfully sued by our employer when those…
Worse than that, many companies have clauses that indicate that any software you write (regardless of whether for the company or not), belongs to them. I don’t know if this would hold up in court, but it’s there in the contract.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
A crucial difference is the US spying is for state use, whereas in China the state is deeply intermixed with industry. State industrial espionage is used for commercial competitive advantage. This is a huge structural and cultural difference. For instance it’s hard to believe China bootstrapped BYD and GWM among others from green fields. They’ve been exfiltrating and transferring automotive technology for decades. Th…
US government have been using all it's tools to destroy US corporation competition since forever. Look at Huawei for just one example.
Huaweis main competition is Ericson and Nokiabin the networking space. Neither American.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.
My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.
I got into this with another set of engineers on Reddit where I discovered there’s a subculture of engineers who don’t believe you can’t actually own code and apparently take a copy of their employers source code repository everytime they switch jobs.
Edit: Updated “can actually own code” to “can’t actually own code”
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, not just corporate espionage, right? State espionage is going to be at every large US company too. To speak to the article, I can only imagine how excited an agency would be to get real-time updates on the Uber movements of a target.
Two things. First, this isn't the same thing; you're talking about embedding a resource in a company to read out real time telemetry from internal systems (information with a short shelf life), not stealing industrial trade secrets (information with a very long shelf life). Second, I can assure you that, even with our imperfect systems, there is actually a set of checks and balances in place to prevent rampant (note…
The last bit strikes me as dubious, considering the Snowden revelations.
Yeah, sure, I'd guess that what China does is at least an order of magnitude worse, and sure, because they're less democratic, but also because they are much often behind - and let's not kid ourselves, in the situations the US feels it's behind, it's also using the widespread backdoors they have access to (Crypto AG, Cisco routers, Juniper Networks, Windows, Intel&Ryzen CPUs...)
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author explains how analyzing and presenting data was worth millions of dollars. The author documents how a senior executive instructed him to write excel . It is clearly their core business. Also, and this comes back to the fantasy/denial/wishful-thinking aspect here, neither I nor the law says core business. That's a word that you added. If you did it as part of your job, then it is, by definition, part of thei…
> neither I nor the law says core business That’s just factually false. You specifically wrote: > Even in California the "I wrote it on my own time" doesn't apply to software that relates to an employer's ***core*** business. You can’t complain about people being “wishful” or in “denial” when they are quoting you. Maybe California law is silent in the topic, but Aeolus wasn’t the person who introduced that specific p…
Oh that’s embarrassing. I did. Apologies. I was wrong to write “core” and wrong to complain when you did it.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#270Great to see @bastawhiz on here.
Box had a collaborative note-taking product called Box Notes (based on Hackpad).
Slight correction: Box Notes was forked off etherpad-lite. Hackpad was a parallel fork of Etherpad.
[context: I was lead engineer on Box Notes till around 2014/2015. I left before the events @bastawhiz described]