Not knowing anything about your company, I can only speculate on the reasons for having to sign this type of agreement. As for my own company, this comes in to play in several areas of the business.
1) Investors. When investors are doing their due dilligence on my company they want to make sure that the IP of the company stays with the company. So the question comes up, "Have all your employees signed [insert policy here]?"
2) Aquisition. Almost the same thing. If you are looking at a potential buy-out for the business, the company doing the aquiring wants to make sure that there are no sticky issues out there anywhere.
Those are the two biggies. The thing you need to realize from the business perspective (and that any good manager should communicate to you) is that exectives are held liable for fudiciary responsibility. What that means is, if I don't get an employee to sign that type of agreement, and some IP ends up in the wrong hands, investors have the right to sue on the basis that I have not upheld fudiciary responsibilities.
There are plenty of open source projects that are highly innovative, producing patentable methods that any self respecting corporate IP lawyer would be drooling all over.
OK that's a funny sentence. Open Source (No Money) != Drooling Lawyers.
Good sales process
on
Nosy Vendors?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This does not have anything to do with open source, it's just good sales tactics on his part. He is a sales person who wants to know where his sales is going to. Don't try to make this an open source thing, it's not.
"The main problem I saw with the ".com's" I worked with was that they bought the most expensive servers (i.e., Sun, DEC & microsoft) they could get their hands on from the get go. They just figured they would have 1,000,000+ visitors a day and equiped for it. I am sure it impressed the VC suits as well to see their invested cash going for "quality" hardware and Operating Systems.
In reality, these ".com's" should have taken off the shelf hardware from CompUSA, fdisked the harddrive, popped in a floppy and FTP installed Linux or BSD. Once they realized that the load was more than the servers could handle then they could have thrown money at the big iron or betting yet, just add on more Linux/BSD servers and scaled up."
--end quote
I used to think like this too.. however, since then I have been involved in 2 startups, both on the fundraising and sales. Fact is that VC money likes to hear the words "Sun" and "Compaq" and stuff like that, so do customers. They DO ask these questions and running on vanilla flavor noname hardware does not get you funding or sales.
But the real issue was not blowing wads of $$ on hardware, it was the overstaffing that really increased the burn rate.
Are there any companies out there building embedded linux stuff for ATM's and slot machines to challenge MS in this market space? I've read lots of comments here about geeks who looked at devices and said, "wouldn't it be neat if that was embedded linux?" But I'm tired of those posts. Your ideas are grand, now go start a company!
MS is making a move into the ATM and slot machine market, who is going to stop them with an embedded linux solution for this space? I'd love to read about it here on this NEWS site.
I've read several posts saying that this is bad because another group of people grow up M$. True. I've also read posts that these schools are a good "target" for free software. This is not how I'm judging this issue at all, please consider the bigger picture:
Would you rather see this money go to lawyers or to a poor school? The argument of M$ vs. free software should be set aside and we should focus on the humanistic side here.
This is not another generation of kids growing up M$, but rather, another generation of kids who don't grow up in the projects and live on welfare. You want that right???
Reality is that software does not make it into schools unless it comes from a charitable contribution from a company with deep pockets (like M$).
I'm no expert, but my friend has a brother in New York who is a construction engineer and explained this to me:
There is only one good way to bring down a steel high-rise, and that's by starting a significant fire in the top 1/3 of the building that is beyond the control of the fire suppression systems. This causes the steel supports in the floors above to become unstable and collapse. The result is, of course, bringing the rest of the building down on top.
We have been using an oursource dev shop from India for the last few projects. (200k to 1 mil $US range projects). It CAN work if you do a few things correctly:
1) Give them a trial run on a smaller project.
2) Design SPEC the bejesus out of what you need.
3) Provide lots of sample code from your dev shop for them to look at. (set explicit expectations)
4) Require code checkin daily to YOUR source code management location. Even if this is one of their staff tasked with moving all source to your server. (accountability. you ask this from your own developers right???)
5) You get what you pay for. Your $100 US per hour c++ guy is the same quality as the $50 per hour overseas developer. That has been my experience anyways. Don't use bargain rate overseas developers, they are very inexperienced.
BTW once you find your groove with an outsourced dev shop, (meaning they staff accordingly for your workload) you can really speed up your development cycles.
Slashdot Mirror
Not knowing anything about your company, I can only speculate on the reasons for having to sign this type of agreement. As for my own company, this comes in to play in several areas of the business.
1) Investors. When investors are doing their due dilligence on my company they want to make sure that the IP of the company stays with the company. So the question comes up, "Have all your employees signed [insert policy here]?"
2) Aquisition. Almost the same thing. If you are looking at a potential buy-out for the business, the company doing the aquiring wants to make sure that there are no sticky issues out there anywhere.
Those are the two biggies. The thing you need to realize from the business perspective (and that any good manager should communicate to you) is that exectives are held liable for fudiciary responsibility. What that means is, if I don't get an employee to sign that type of agreement, and some IP ends up in the wrong hands, investors have the right to sue on the basis that I have not upheld fudiciary responsibilities.
Hope that helps a little.
OK that's a funny sentence. Open Source (No Money) != Drooling Lawyers.
I built the face on mars.. have to go now, Mike Wallace is on the line.
Tickets to the Lord of the Rings movie?
This does not have anything to do with open source, it's just good sales tactics on his part. He is a sales person who wants to know where his sales is going to. Don't try to make this an open source thing, it's not.
License the 2 cpu version, put the saving (about 35k) into hiring a grade A db architect who can make that server bark, roll over, whatever.
There is so much crappy db architecture out there makes me sick!
--quote
"The main problem I saw with the ".com's" I worked with was that they bought the most expensive servers (i.e., Sun, DEC & microsoft) they could get their hands on from the get go. They just figured they would have 1,000,000+ visitors a day and equiped for it. I am sure it impressed the VC suits as well to see their invested cash going for "quality" hardware and Operating Systems.
In reality, these ".com's" should have taken off the shelf hardware from CompUSA, fdisked the harddrive, popped in a floppy and FTP installed Linux or BSD. Once they realized that the load was more than the servers could handle then they could have thrown money at the big iron or betting yet, just add on more Linux/BSD servers and scaled up."
--end quote
I used to think like this too.. however, since then I have been involved in 2 startups, both on the fundraising and sales. Fact is that VC money likes to hear the words "Sun" and "Compaq" and stuff like that, so do customers. They DO ask these questions and running on vanilla flavor noname hardware does not get you funding or sales.
But the real issue was not blowing wads of $$ on hardware, it was the overstaffing that really increased the burn rate.
Are there any companies out there building embedded linux stuff for ATM's and slot machines to challenge MS in this market space? I've read lots of comments here about geeks who looked at devices and said, "wouldn't it be neat if that was embedded linux?" But I'm tired of those posts. Your ideas are grand, now go start a company!
MS is making a move into the ATM and slot machine market, who is going to stop them with an embedded linux solution for this space? I'd love to read about it here on this NEWS site.
I've read several posts saying that this is bad because another group of people grow up M$. True. I've also read posts that these schools are a good "target" for free software. This is not how I'm judging this issue at all, please consider the bigger picture:
Would you rather see this money go to lawyers or to a poor school? The argument of M$ vs. free software should be set aside and we should focus on the humanistic side here.
This is not another generation of kids growing up M$, but rather, another generation of kids who don't grow up in the projects and live on welfare. You want that right???
Reality is that software does not make it into schools unless it comes from a charitable contribution from a company with deep pockets (like M$).
"tell me again why we pay this Dr. to test pipes? And howcome half of his budget goes towards delivery pizza??"
I'm no expert, but my friend has a brother in New York who is a construction engineer and explained this to me:
There is only one good way to bring down a steel high-rise, and that's by starting a significant fire in the top 1/3 of the building that is beyond the control of the fire suppression systems. This causes the steel supports in the floors above to become unstable and collapse. The result is, of course, bringing the rest of the building down on top.
We have been using an oursource dev shop from India for the last few projects. (200k to 1 mil $US range projects). It CAN work if you do a few things correctly:
1) Give them a trial run on a smaller project.
2) Design SPEC the bejesus out of what you need.
3) Provide lots of sample code from your dev shop for them to look at. (set explicit expectations)
4) Require code checkin daily to YOUR source code management location. Even if this is one of their staff tasked with moving all source to your server. (accountability. you ask this from your own developers right???)
5) You get what you pay for. Your $100 US per hour c++ guy is the same quality as the $50 per hour overseas developer. That has been my experience anyways. Don't use bargain rate overseas developers, they are very inexperienced.
BTW once you find your groove with an outsourced dev shop, (meaning they staff accordingly for your workload) you can really speed up your development cycles.
Hope that helps.