421–430 of 565 posts
> Uber Sheets
Hee hee, this name is funny on a number of levels :)
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No idea what your point is, sorry.
i understand ownership, but software and code are so easy to copy, transfer and modify that it would be stupid not to do it. it's not like stealing a car. arrr in other words: ownership of immaterial goods is mostly a scam
Best 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…
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…
Just out of curiosity: can't these companies be sued by the IP holding company when they try to sell outside of China, and be forbidden to sell their products in US and Europe?
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"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…
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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.
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,…
IIRC the USA did plenty of that.
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... Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day ... You can't really do this. Depends on your employment contract but code you write for an employer is usually copyright to them ... My first reaction was to publish the code on Github ... You can't really do that either.
I mean, I asked at the time, and I did it. If either company wants to start a legal fight over a pile of code that neither of them wanted that's old enough to be in elementary school, they know how to reach me.
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How did this become a thing on a cultural scale? Like that everyone does it and it is almost expected as it were?
It's master planned by the government. Just Google "Chinese protectionist" and then any industry. The Chinese government has been actively targeting everything from CNC machine tools to medical devices and semiconductors for decades. Some industries with more success than others. Anything they import, especially industrial equipment like textile looms, cnc machines, semiconductor equipment, etc. There are big, long t…
There are simply too many potential problems that could come up in this scenario and be the cause for catastrophic financial results in the end. And most of them wouldn't nessecarily be easily found via unit tests.
"Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day. My idea was to take this code and spruce it up for Uber’s use case." "My first reaction was to publish the code on Github." I’m very surprised by this, isn’t the code property of Box, or Uber? The author does not mention their authorisation before releasing it under MIT license.
Author here. The code was originally written outside of work hours. I offered the code to Box and they didn't want it. If Uber wants a few thousand lines of JavaScript from over half a decade ago that didn't originate with them and that they used for less than a month, they can send me a letter.
Example: "All Intellectual Property Rights with regard to Developed Materials will be exclusively vested in and owned by the Company." (with additional data protection and confidentiality clause protecting company property)