Slashdot Mirror
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."
Or do something related, that (initially) supports the existing product, making it faster or better? This will allow you to exploit the knowledge you already have and use your current employer as a reference/sales source.
Most start-ups I've ever worked for spawned from another (bloated) company in a symbiotic, but evolved to outstrip them.
(And you and I both know that on your computer somewhere are a load of tools that only you know about which could easily be suborned to your needs.)
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
A friend of mine did this about 10 years ago. The original company accused them of theft of sourcecode (which they hadn't done) and made criminal charges as well as suing them. Fortunately one of the new company's founders was a Lay Magistrate. He got the court fatstracked to court and swore under oath that they did not have any source code, which was enough for another judge to throw the case out!
They also brought a civil case for stealing intellectual property, but most of what they included was standard (It was Travel Agent's software), so they put together a brochure of various other solutions and shown that there was nothing that their "old" company had uniquely developed.
The old company then made a big mistake. They wrote to all their clients telling them not to deal with the company my friend and colleagues had set up because their software was "no good" and "ripped off", and that they would not support anyone who even looked at the software. They had 50 enquiries that week, and went from having three large customers (which covered costs and paid a quarter of a years salaries) to 20 in six months (which meant that they were pretty well off)!
I have "re-written" a few programs in my time. Here is what you need to do: 1) Plan on being sued. You can't avoid it (the big guys use it to keep you from competing). 2) Work around the system. To sue someone, you actually need someone to serve papers to. This the first thing to attack. Form two S-Corps. One where you transfer all the money (off shore account is a must) and one with all the debts and oh yeah - your public face/address/etc to the world. 3) Use a post office drop box. To be served papers, they have to hand you the documents. Kind of hard to hand them to you if they can't meet you. 4) Having been "served" (which can take them months - talk about some pissed off lawyers). It is time for the next step. Offer them a couple hundred bucks to buzz off (if they have sued you before, they'll take the money - if not, time for a lesson). 5) Don't send anyone to represent the S-Corp in court. Ignore them. 5) They win a default judgement. Yawn. Ignore them. 6) The lawyers involve the county sherrif. He'll serve you notice they are seizing the property (bank accounts, property, etc) held by your debt laden, assetless S-corp (depending on where it is served you have a number of days to vacate etc). Yawn. Great. Give it to them because it is worthless. 7) Form a new S-corp, give load it with debts and your new public face and off you go again. Rinse and repeat as often as necessary. Oh yeah, one more thing - don't forget to pay your S-Corp taxes. IRS can come after your personally for back taxes. But, civil lawsuits can't.
Some non-competes are enforceable. My father-in-law worked for a wireless company and when they let him go they paid him 2/3rds of his salary to not work for a year. This was a contract, and since he was being compensated, it was enforceable. I think he was also able to collect unemployment during that time as well because he was being paid for past work, not current or future work.
The moral of the story is that if anyone asks you to sign a non-compete agreement, ask for money. The HR folks will then usually file the NCA in the circular bin. I know the two times I've brought it up, I have been hired without signing it.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
"Anyone in the USA can be sued for anything in this day and age."
Fixed that for you
"Anyone can be sued in the USA for anything in this day and age."
Fixed that for you
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It's uncanny....I could have written this exact same post....sigh....
My company was acquired by a much larger company, and "they" chose to consolidate our platforms onto a product offering that I (and my coworkers) feel is a much lesser product. We offer a hosted ASP solution with accompanying business consulting. From a tech standpoint (myself being the primary developer on our software), the platform we are moving to is horrible, crappily written, aging, and falling apart on itself.
I have had the same thoughts about wanting to do it myself, rewriting from scratch, but there would be obvious similarities in part because I wrote much of our own code, and because there are only certain ways you can do things in our business. On top of all that, we had to sign non-compete employee agreements when we "hired" onto the company that bought us. I wasn't (am not still) in a position to quit my job, and at that time I didn't know what garbage this company was about. Unfortunately, it seems I'm also in a state that *does* enforce non-competes.
My thought now, is to write competing software, and open source it as a project on sourceforge. The way I read it, the noncompete keeps me from working for a competitor or starting my own competing business, or somehow profiting from competition, for a period of one year. But if I write software that does what we do, better, and allow someone else to use it and base a business on it, that would at least be something. Plus, maybe some other opportunity will come along, I'll go there for a year, and then could really focus on creating a competing startup after that. The sad thing is, this company has bought the top 3 competitors in our business niche within a year. This foolish "integration" for has effectively stymied any progress for our market for at least 2 years, without any signs form management that they want to actually create any new or innovative ideas. And we're consolidating on technology from 1996 - for a web-based ASP business!!
Honestly, I have no interest in the business - I enjoy the people I work with, and had pride in providing what I thought was a great product. Now I am embarrassed to be associated with the product offerings we have. I don't know if spite alone is motivation enough to create and maintain a new software project. But I think publishing an open source php/mysql platform solution that basically does what our software does is the only way.