I’m really curious how Uber China was actually supposed to work. I once worked for a company that built server software and my understanding was that they were partnered with a Chinese company to sell into that market. We built a branded, localised installer for them. I’m not sure what the business arrangement was or what equity relationships (if any) there were between the companies. But I can’t imagine Uber would ever be allowed to have a fully owned Chinese subsidiary competing in that market?
I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
381–390 of 565 posts
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are gray areas but I do not think you are in one. > and then later adapted and expanded upon that code (or even started over, with the knowledge of what you learned from others' work) These are extremely different scenarios. Starting with a copyrighted material and modifying it is not at all the same as reading material and starting over. The first is violating copyright, the second is a derivative work. If I r…
I wrote the comment above, though I'm not the author of the code that you appear to think I am. But I am in agreement with him. > Their employment contract for-sure states they own any work produced by you during your employment, and you agreed to this. There are many open legal questions as to where this line is drawn. Surely the line falls somewhere between "every character I've ever typed on a keyboard" and "the v…
> IP ownership is much more complex than portrayed in HBO's Silicon Valley.
IANAL; ut's not quite that simple, but it's in the right general direction. If you need specific advice, talk to an actual lawyer tho.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#383Best 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…
> 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.
When exactly was this "day" when industrial espionage was legal?
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#384Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I regret is not taking a copy of the code I wrote for another company, so many handy little utility functions I made that I then had to recreate. The transaction costs for b2b are far too high for any reasonable sale, so exfiltration is the utilitarian choice.
That’s still just theft if you’re not a contractor? Full time software employees are doing work for hire. There’s plenty of moral and ideological arguments about theft being morally acceptable in this situation but I was more marveling at the people who thought that taking source code from their company was legally not theft
1. Suppose the OP did not take the source code files, but memorized the source code and later recalled it from memory. Would that be theft?
2. Suppose the OP neither took the file nor memorized the code, but had photographic memory and replayed the exact visual scenes during their creation of the utility functions and copied down the code from what they saw in their mind's eye. Would that be theft?
3. Suppose the OP was solving a seemingly novel problem and suddenly remembered how they solved the exact same problem when they were employed by company X. Are they obligated to banish this solution from their mind?
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huaweis main competition is Ericson and Nokiabin the networking space. Neither American.
Huawei is a giant. In phones they had bigger marketshare than Apple. Their chips are nearly on par with Qualcomm. It is naive to believe they are banned for security concerns.
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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except China has required technology transfer and has been actively committing state sponsored industrial espionage for decades. Surely this isn’t news? I’m down with China as a competitor, but we have a strong division between state and industry and China does not. I don’t think a unipolar world is a good idea, and I’m glad for a resurgent China. But it’s absurd to put on blinders and believe forced technology trans…
> actively committing state sponsored industrial espionage for decades I'm sure you are right but I feel this is actually beneficial. The interests that have captured China are likely different from the ones in the US, and much different from the inferior oligarchs that have captured my home country (Canada). I see their national interests having an unintended consequence; the creation of markets of scale for product…
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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 r…
Yeah, you want to get rid of uncertainty, but it's here to stay. The whole legal system is not brought to its knees over the fact that no code on GitHub (gasp) is automatically guaranteed to be safe against copyright infringement.
> It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie.
Yes, absolutely: presumption, not certainty. (Nitpicking the phrasing: presumption that the copyright is not a lie, the issue does not even venture into licensing.)
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Is it the phrasing you think is racist? I don't think pointing out the fact that the student body of a given school is, for example, 20% Chinese, is racist. It's merely a statement of fact.
IMO "crawling" is a rather emotive word choice because it often applies to insects
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Perhaps (well.. almost certainly) that would disincentivize any of the companies in these industry from innovating at all (if you can’t gain any edge by additional investment since anything you do will be stolen you might as well start stealing if that cheaper).
This would also especially favor large mega corporations as long as they are efficient enough (due to obvious reasons).