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Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job?
hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."
The can absolutely sue you, but they'll lose. If they can't take two blocks of code and say "he stole this" they have nothing. I assume you didn't sign a non-compete agreement though cuz then you'd lose.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Subject.
Why not come up with a fresh idea? Spend your time coding instead of in court.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
...but the hardest and most important part of running a software product company is selling the product. Your new, better designed, better documented, better implemented product has to compete with the same feature set - you said it yourself - with a more established product. What advantages will your product give the customer, making it easier to sell and possibly making the customers switch ?
As for the legal issues, IANAL.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Get a lawyer.
Long answer:
If you signed any sort of NDA, you might be liable for any information you gained while on the job (for example, architecture, business logic, algorithms.) If you didn't, you still might (theft of intellectual property.) I imagine you'd be quite safe if you could somehow prove that you had never inspected the code in any way. Since I'm guessing at least one of you was a programmer, I imagine you can't prove this. I, personally, would find the whole thing dubious and recommend avoiding it, but if you want to try anyway - get a lawyer.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
First off, don't ask "can I be sued for this?" You can be sued for eating a ham sandwich. The important question is whether you'll face legal action over this, and only secondarily whether you'll prevail. Court process today is so messed up that paying for a lawsuit, in both time and money, is often more ruinous than the final judgment against you.
Being in the legal right does not insulate you from lawsuits. It never has. You should be more concerned with pre-emptively preventing a lawsuit from being filed, not whether you would prevail in court if one were to be filed.
One of the reasons why so many people say "get a lawyer!" is because, believe it or not, lawyers are very good at this sort of thing. Lawyers are excellent business negotiators. Talk to a lawyer, explain what you want to do, explain that you don't want to be sued. The odds are very good the lawyer will be able to get you a way in which you get to do what you want to do without worrying about a lawsuit being filed.
A good lawyer wins lawsuits. A great lawyer prevents lawsuits from being filed in the first place.
Good luck! :)
Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever?
Yes. All three. They might not succeed but be prepared for a lengthy legal battle which will cost more than losing.
Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on?
Yes. But only in general, there are many exceptions.
We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce.
You're in a different situation from most other cases. Other cases have most likely been people working on broadly related but ultimately different products. You appear to be planning to directly compete with your previous employer's core product, using knowledge gained whilst working for your previous employer.
Sorry to reply to self, but this topic got me because of the whole start-your-business stuff.
In the past two years, I've started my own business. I've learned that I can do only one thing at a time: either sales or coding. Not both.
For me it turned out that I'm not bad at sales. I hardly touch code anymore because I just don't have the time; I have to keep the 'pipe' filled with new things. But I'm OK with that.
Question is: are you OK with that as well?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
"Anyone can be sued for anything in this day and age."
I'm going to sue hellion0 for not translating his post into Chinese. Think it will get dismissed before we even hit the door? How about any lawyer laughing you out of his office?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I think your biggest obstacle to success will be your attitude towards salespeople!
As fabulous as you may think your software is, selling it is rather important!
Unless you patent them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
your friend seems like a giant asshole.
First of all, posting a question like this on a public forum such as Slashdot isn't going to get you any answers you can have confidence in. In fact, the posting itself, though made on a "no name" basis, does provide a few clues, is traceable to whoever posted it initially, and could come back to haunt you, as evidence of your timing and intent, if nothing else. Are you sure no one could ever link this up to you? Are you sending emails like this to each other as well? Pretty dumb, if you are. Find a lawyer and get some competent (and confidential) advice before you make indelible records of your deliberations and footprints.
In that case the question is: "Why does a forum for geeks not allow anything outside what's covered by ISO Latin-1?"
Is IPA somehow dangerous? Cyrillic? Mathematical symbols? Or the Euro sign? This is a forum for technical people who, due to their geek nature, prefer to use the appropriate notation to communicate things not easily communicated in ASCII. For example, it's extremely difficult to accurately and concisely communicate the pronounciation of something without using IPA. That's what IPA was designed for. That's why it's in Unicode.
I get the feeling that the whitelist was put in place by someone who doesn't really know Unicode (and/or didn't want to spend time with it) and thus opted to just keep Latin-1 since that's what he knows. There are a lot of characters in Unicode that could safely be whitelisted; depending on how well-written the filter is this should be a matter of one afternoon with a Unicode character list. I mean, we don't demand Linear-B; the safe parts of the BMP (all non-combining non-control code points except those between D800 and F8FF (FFFF if you don't want to include Han)) would be everything 99.999% of all posters need.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I am Ashamed of you people, this is slashdot and someone here has just given us a Dorothy Dixer. (Please note this is my interpretation I'm tiny whinny bit biased) Well you see there was this Operating system called Unix that was written in the 1960's.... AT&T which was a phone company couldn't sell, due to the laws at the time, software so they allowed Unix to used by University's for a small fee. [this is probably a bit loosely based on truth here] In the 1980's the laws changed and AT&T could sell software. Well AT&T said everything to do with Unix is ours and any software that has been added to Unix by the University's is also ours and pays us Mega amounts of cash to use it. Well some people at University of California Berkeley (UCB) got very annoyed with this and released a version of UNIX without any AT&T code. This version was called BSD 4.4-lite a court battle then ensued that ran until the mid 1990's. Novell then purchased Unix from AT&T and some sort deal was done and UCB no longer distributes BSD. heres a link to the story. http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html so lessons learnt 1) You will get sued 2) If you hang in there you might just win 3) Be prepared to cut a deal 4) [maybe this should have been first] Get a good lawyer !!! 5) You ever here of a guy called Richard Stallman ? - sort of the same thing happened to him but he started something called the free software foundation. http://www.fsf.org/
Only if you drink too much of it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Hi, You also need to consider the fact that you are infringing on their intellectual property-- even if you aren't taking a single piece of code. Intellectual property can be defined as an indea-- which is essentially what you are taking with you when you leave. You are taking the idea of the company's product and building upon it for your product. I am not sure who would win the suit, but you have to consider that you could be in violation of stealing their "ideas" and expanding upon it-- even though their current product sucks.
Make sure you have a lawyer look at your situation first, but should also have a solid business plan before embarking on venture like this. While I'm no fan of "over-hyped sales drones" you need to step back and objectively ask yourself who is going to secure the customer base for your product. While you may be good writing code, can you sell a product or do you know what to look for in hiring someone? Likewise, who is going to take on the role of project, and maybe staff, manager? Then you need to start thinking about payroll and healthcare. It takes more than writing good code for even a small software company to be successful--you'll probably find yourself gaining a lot of respect for the people you were previously complaining about.
Seriously. Giving bad advice to do illegal actions is one thing, but then it gets modded "interesting"?
I frequently mod stuff "Interesting" that I know is wrong. Then I mod the responses with good information "Informative". This is how one gets an interesting and informative discussion.
Yes it is... However one should assume that in 2008 a tech website would be able to support the technology X-SAMPA crudely reimplements. Also, SAMPA doesn't have nearly the penetration of IPA - while one can expect virtually anyone who has learned a foreign language to have at least encountered IPA, SAMPA is useful only to those who do phonetic discussions in a long-outdated encoding.
Hm, that's funny. I always assumed they had some kind of format IDNs are supposed to be transmitted as. You know, some kind of puny code that can be algorithmically derived... Oh, wait! They have such a format! And I'd be willing to bet that it's entirely possible to automatically mangle URLs entered to the appropriate Punycode representation (not to mention that all major browser already do that in the status bar).
But the appropriate Unicode glyph doesn't. And that's another thing wrong with Slashdot's weird filter: Some glyphs work when entered directly, some only work when entered as HTTP entities and yet others don't work either way. IPA glyphs get converted to HTML entities but those entities are then filtered. It's impossible to determine beforehand whether Slash accepts a glyph and in which form it does.
And that's probably why Digg is the superior platform, community and content aside. "We won't do anything more than the absolute minimum required to keep the site running unless it significantly increases our bottom line" is how corporations show that they run the platform not for the community but for the ad partners. Of course the weird filtering is not the only problem - the CSS has been broken for ages (especially in Idle, even though that doesn't hurt much) but apparently there's no business case for getting that right, either.
I'm waiting for the day when Slashdot changes its "we won't delete posts unless legally forced to" policy to "we won't delete posts unless it's in SourceForge, Inc.'s financial interest".
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)