411–420 of 565 posts
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That's because that code wasn't in use, so there's no lost business.
That isn't how ownership works.
When it can't possible serve that end (again, selling a set of utility methods that would take a dev a few hours to make from spec is impossible) people should discard it.
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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
The range of circumstances in which it is morally acceptable are MUCH broader.
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Quite the opposite. Software written off the clock that does not compete with the employer is not only not the property of the employer, but any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable. Many businesses even actively encourage their developers to contribute to open source projects.
> any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable I highly doubt that this is true, at least in the US. Can you cite case law? You can write a contract granting ownership of all the songs a musician performs, or all the books a writer writes during a specified time period. Why shouldn't the same be true of programmers and code?
This is an even stronger case than anything being discussed in this thread. Oracle claimed to own code written by their own employees on their clock and still lost this case. Google won their claim of fair use.
That's exactly and explicitly what an MIT licensed open source project would fall under: fair use by the employer and nobody owns it despite the original author also happening to work for said employer. Authorship is distinct from ownership. As well, there's the notion of role vs identity. You can act under the role of an employee to fork a public repo for your employer's purposes, yet act under the role of the upstream author to have published something more generic in the past without knowledge of your employer's future use case. Your identity is irrelevant. The only thing that really matters is that the public repo does not contain code proprietary to any business. It's on the employer claiming the code is proprietary to prove it. Examples from the article would be those data science functions, the UI they wanted, etc.
Do people not realize why these licenses exist in the first place? What do you all think they were doing over there at MIT to draft up such a license?
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This isn't that. This is engineers deliberately taking tech to somewhere where they know IP laws won't be enforced. It's not like I'm saying they can learn calculus here and then go to China and use calculus to design things. It's that I'm saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way. If it were in any other country but China,…
> It's that I'm saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way. I really doubt this unless all the inputs are commoditised. Industrial espionage usually fails because if you don’t have the know how to make the tools that make the tools it’s difficult to impossible to literally copy it. Not saying what you’re saying doesn’t happen…
Smart and knowledgable people in a certain field, but who are slightly stuck, can be helped by a few tiny details. If someone can provide a specific manual or piece of documentation, or just a photo copy or image of some key detail then those smart and knowledgable people can pass the hurdle and continue.
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> 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?
The economic power of the USA was arguably built on it.
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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.
It's both the phrasing and the content.
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I think you might be surprised how easy this process is at some big tech companies. For me the bigger hurdle is getting past a privacy review, not the issue of the license.
Yes, I would be surprised. What big tech company makes it easy for you to take code written and deployed there while you were employed, and just open-source it? I know there are big tech firms that own everything you do outside of work, but have a fairly easy process to allow you to release that as open-source. But this is different, this is about code written for and deployed by the company itself, that isn't part o…
I could even imagine approving of a policy for the open sourcing / licensing of code, where any code that's used or previously used by the company in any way needs to go through an approvals process if anyone wants to open source it, while anything created but never used has a much simpler barrier such as manager agreeing in writing that it's unneeded code and therefore eligible for instant open sourcing under a specific license and specific terms of release.
> "But this is different, this is about code written for and deployed by the company itself"
Written for, yes, but seemingly never deployed (except to the extent that it could be demo'd and rejected). From the article:
> [After looking at a product owned by an unrelated team in the company, he single-handedly decided to make what he thought would be a good add-on or sibling to it] "I demoed Box Sums to the Box Notes team at some point, and they nitpicked the UI and implementation details (“What if two people type in the same cell at the same time? They’ll just overwrite each other.” ). Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day."
It's not impossible "nothing came of it" is a shortened version of "they said it seemed like an awesome tool but too far from the original scope to want to take on and commit to maintaining, and as they said there was no chance that decision would change my manager agreed to sign off on my releasing it under MIT license as is allowed for un-used code."
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I've watched this happen. I've watched key, core engineers and technical leaders work for US and European companies, develop their next generation products, then turn around and design and develop essentially the exact same thing for the Chinese market. They then build a company, in China, that makes essentially the same product, but for the Chinese Market, and with Chinese investors, etc. Examples: Thoratec/Abbot He…
So an engineer learns how to make something, and then goes elsewhere to make it. To be honest, the way you put ut, the story feels OK to me. There are many truly bad examples, e.g. the arm china story, but engineers doing their thing is not one of them.
It's not long till the capital class claims ownership of your brain too. /s
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You probably don't have the authority to allow your report to release "company code" on their personal Github account.
I think you might be surprised how easy this process is at some big tech companies. For me the bigger hurdle is getting past a privacy review, not the issue of the license.