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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."
so I will go on and say that this isn't 1994, pretty much every single OS/Programming language/browsers supports lots of characters(ok, so maybe Windows doesn't, but that hardly qualifies as an OS.)
Oh ahahahahaha. Windows NT was fully Unicode as far back as 1994. Win95 had Unicode APIs (if not good support).
Windows has always been ahead of the game on multilanguage support (at the OS level at least).
Non competes were shat on recently.
Court case declared them bullshit.
Great precedent.