It would work as far as getting me out of the legal limbo. It would not have worked as far as fixing and delivering the component of the system when the company wanted it delivered. Different problem requires a different solution. Why is that surprising?
How do you think I kept track of changes in chronological order? By hand? There are tools which will let you view deltas across the the entire repository (and I did mention that repository was in the company's private vcs). But this doesn't address keeping track of assumptions which go into building the system.
Absolutely no system is built to function in all situations. Especially systems built on small scale. So there is always limitations which you must accept. If you boss says, don't spend time addressing issue X, but issue Y is more important, then well... he is paying for your time. So you can try addressing issue X on your time, but there is infinitely many of these X's, and no one will pay you for that time. You sigh and address issue Y.
A good boss protects his people when issue X starts surfacing and bites everyone in the ass. A bad boss, gets scared and starts pointing fingers and assigning blame. An overworked boss will forget that someone brought up X and will think that it was never even considered. I am saying that my boss was closer to the 3rd category than the 2nd. He would say that X doesn't need to fixed because he didn't think it would be a problem and then he would remember it as X not being a problem. And he'd publically make that declaration. So when the problems surfaced, he would not understand why.
And would have to be reminded exactly when he made the decision not to address X and then be shown in the source that X did not break between the point it was discussed and the point a problem surfaced. In order made such a demonstration, you need to be able to be certain that X is not touched by any of the code deltas during that span of time.
wadr u sound full of paranoia
I give people the benefit of the doubt. Until they prove otherwise. He proved otherwise many times.
This or, as some others suggested, a bug report would probably do the trick. I don't know why I haven't thought of it myself. Probably a mental block because I already had the fix.
Is there a reason why you didn't post the patches when you found them?
I didn't trust his "it's Ok" at that point. Mostly because of how often he changed his mind and blamed others. He often made outrageous claims about the code base. I had to start documenting both his requests and to monitor full code base changes in chronological order just to be able to refute his claims. I think it was more a matter of his being mercurial than "evil". When I reached out to his boss, he insisted that my boss had to make the call about what to do with OSS submissions.
try to sue someone for a one-liner taken from SO and see how far it gets you
If it enables their competition, they can sue for loss of sales. They can also sue anyone who uses anything based on my fork of the project years from now by claiming root of the poisonous tree. They don't need to sue to stop use. They can sue for monetary damages resulting from loss of sales if any of their competitors use the same project in their product.
I'm assuming the project hasn't been updated for several years for it to be in "abandoned" status.
I could fork them on github and the fork could be picked up by some distributions. On my last check, there were no public forks which would contain these fixes.
describe your bug fixes to those people and they can fix them independently of you
I think my agreement stated that they own all work product. And since the projects are in common use, improving them could be be argued to be helping my former employer's competition (because they can incorporate the better versions in their products). I wasn't adding huge features to them. They just had very minor bugs and we were the edge case where they would show up a lot. The projects are in common use (despite not being maintained), so that should tell you that they are not some smoking POS which had to be rewritten a lot. From what I can remember, the fixes were too small (within 1-3 lines) to be done differently. Although rewriting larger chunks of surrounding code may be an option. My boss was prone to changing his mind, so I don't trust his word without a legally-binding framework.
The projects were abandoned. That is, they are in common use, but are not maintained. So I am not sure that reaching out to the projects is an option. I also don't know if that in itself would not violate my former employer's copyright.
I would characterize my former boss as mercurial rather than "an asshole". Without some legal framework which indemnifies me, I would not rely on him not changing his mind down the line. And I am not crazy about paying for lawyers just to submit patches to projects I already had to fix which were abandoned by their original authors.
That would mean a formal legal letter. Honestly, I don't think I want to pay a lawyer for it. And I have my reasons for thinking that their word that "it's Ok", is not something that I can rely on. I don't want to break the thin veil of anonymity which is slashdot, but my former boss was prone to changing his mind. I would not want to rely on it as legally binding.
Now that the county attorney wants his phone to be more hackable, can the attorney still claim to certify that he affords attorney-client privilege to his client (the county)?
Well, "better working conditions" also means less likely to be killed in a conflict when it comes to service members, so I'd say that personal interest is a pretty good barometer for this special interest group. But they are not the ultimate.... not by a long shot. Environmentalists are. They are the 3rd largest murdering philosophy in the history of the world (after Communism and Fascism) if you go purely by body count. And they derive less personal benefit from their destruction than even the drug dealers do. I only mention drug dealers because they are probably the 2nd smallest in the persona-gain-relative-to-damage-done ratio.
Sorry, but I am going to trust my memory on that one rather than try fact checking an AC. Yes, it can be easily googled. But if you can't put a minimum of your reputation on the line by posting under an established pseudonym, why should I spend the time on fact checking someone who wants no skin in the game of winning this argument? Oh, and if you don't get my point about parliamentary system, sorry. It's a fairly new idea. Not everyone gets things fast enough and on the 1st explanation. Such is life.
Did you really think I hadn't noticed you were being sarcastic? You're dumber than you give yourself credit for!
Did you fail to see that I was mocking your uncalled-for smugness? I am beginning to question your super-smart-guy credentials. What a disappointment.
A PhD is not what I have that shows I'm super-smart
A patent? A non-self-published book, a peer-reviewed paper? A precedent-establishing legal argument? Anything which shows any original contribution to the collective knowledge of the civilization?
Republicans are the ones who like buying shiny weapons. So that when we do go to war, very few of our soldiers die. Do you really think that without all the military spending we'd have less than 2% casualty rate in the war zones?
ha? I didn't say anything about race. I have to defend points I haven't made? Thanks for letting me know I suck at statistics. I'll work better to impress you next time, I guess. Just to be sure, I follow along, you are disagreeing with me, right? Otherwise, that was really gratuitous. And if you *are* disagreeing with me, on what exactly?
Umm? What? I don't know any Republican politician who wants being gay to be illegal. What's marriage got to do with sex, exactly? It's a property contract. Sure, people associate it with sex, but being married doesn't give a husband the right to have sex with his wife.... You can still be charged with rape if you are married, so... the only thing that a marriage contract actually controls is property rights. How do you extrapolate opposition to gay sex from opposition to gay marriage?
Honestly, I really don't get how you can bothered by a few crazies planted into a peaceful demonstration in Ukraine who were spouting xenophobic slogans, but you are ok with the RF government turning RF into a fascist state. Why do you care to hate enemies of RF if its biggest enemies are its own government. They are the ones who have turned the country into a prison again.
Slashdot Mirror
It would work as far as getting me out of the legal limbo. It would not have worked as far as fixing and delivering the component of the system when the company wanted it delivered. Different problem requires a different solution. Why is that surprising?
How do you think I kept track of changes in chronological order? By hand? There are tools which will let you view deltas across the the entire repository (and I did mention that repository was in the company's private vcs). But this doesn't address keeping track of assumptions which go into building the system.
Absolutely no system is built to function in all situations. Especially systems built on small scale. So there is always limitations which you must accept. If you boss says, don't spend time addressing issue X, but issue Y is more important, then well... he is paying for your time. So you can try addressing issue X on your time, but there is infinitely many of these X's, and no one will pay you for that time. You sigh and address issue Y.
A good boss protects his people when issue X starts surfacing and bites everyone in the ass. A bad boss, gets scared and starts pointing fingers and assigning blame. An overworked boss will forget that someone brought up X and will think that it was never even considered. I am saying that my boss was closer to the 3rd category than the 2nd. He would say that X doesn't need to fixed because he didn't think it would be a problem and then he would remember it as X not being a problem. And he'd publically make that declaration. So when the problems surfaced, he would not understand why.
And would have to be reminded exactly when he made the decision not to address X and then be shown in the source that X did not break between the point it was discussed and the point a problem surfaced. In order made such a demonstration, you need to be able to be certain that X is not touched by any of the code deltas during that span of time.
wadr u sound full of paranoia
I give people the benefit of the doubt. Until they prove otherwise. He proved otherwise many times.
This or, as some others suggested, a bug report would probably do the trick. I don't know why I haven't thought of it myself. Probably a mental block because I already had the fix.
Is there a reason why you didn't post the patches when you found them?
I didn't trust his "it's Ok" at that point. Mostly because of how often he changed his mind and blamed others. He often made outrageous claims about the code base. I had to start documenting both his requests and to monitor full code base changes in chronological order just to be able to refute his claims. I think it was more a matter of his being mercurial than "evil". When I reached out to his boss, he insisted that my boss had to make the call about what to do with OSS submissions.
Worst case you become an underground hacker/terrorist. Wouldn't that be exciting?
No. I get that you are kidding. But still... No.
try to sue someone for a one-liner taken from SO and see how far it gets you
If it enables their competition, they can sue for loss of sales. They can also sue anyone who uses anything based on my fork of the project years from now by claiming root of the poisonous tree. They don't need to sue to stop use. They can sue for monetary damages resulting from loss of sales if any of their competitors use the same project in their product.
I'm assuming the project hasn't been updated for several years for it to be in "abandoned" status.
I could fork them on github and the fork could be picked up by some distributions. On my last check, there were no public forks which would contain these fixes.
describe your bug fixes to those people and they can fix them independently of you
This seems like a solution which would work.
This may actually be the best advise I've seen so far.
I think my agreement stated that they own all work product. And since the projects are in common use, improving them could be be argued to be helping my former employer's competition (because they can incorporate the better versions in their products). I wasn't adding huge features to them. They just had very minor bugs and we were the edge case where they would show up a lot. The projects are in common use (despite not being maintained), so that should tell you that they are not some smoking POS which had to be rewritten a lot. From what I can remember, the fixes were too small (within 1-3 lines) to be done differently. Although rewriting larger chunks of surrounding code may be an option. My boss was prone to changing his mind, so I don't trust his word without a legally-binding framework.
It's a former employer (I think I mentioned that in the question).
The projects were abandoned. That is, they are in common use, but are not maintained. So I am not sure that reaching out to the projects is an option. I also don't know if that in itself would not violate my former employer's copyright.
I would characterize my former boss as mercurial rather than "an asshole". Without some legal framework which indemnifies me, I would not rely on him not changing his mind down the line. And I am not crazy about paying for lawyers just to submit patches to projects I already had to fix which were abandoned by their original authors.
That would mean a formal legal letter. Honestly, I don't think I want to pay a lawyer for it. And I have my reasons for thinking that their word that "it's Ok", is not something that I can rely on. I don't want to break the thin veil of anonymity which is slashdot, but my former boss was prone to changing his mind. I would not want to rely on it as legally binding.
Now that the county attorney wants his phone to be more hackable, can the attorney still claim to certify that he affords attorney-client privilege to his client (the county)?
Well, "better working conditions" also means less likely to be killed in a conflict when it comes to service members, so I'd say that personal interest is a pretty good barometer for this special interest group. But they are not the ultimate.... not by a long shot. Environmentalists are. They are the 3rd largest murdering philosophy in the history of the world (after Communism and Fascism) if you go purely by body count. And they derive less personal benefit from their destruction than even the drug dealers do. I only mention drug dealers because they are probably the 2nd smallest in the persona-gain-relative-to-damage-done ratio.
Sorry, but I am going to trust my memory on that one rather than try fact checking an AC. Yes, it can be easily googled. But if you can't put a minimum of your reputation on the line by posting under an established pseudonym, why should I spend the time on fact checking someone who wants no skin in the game of winning this argument? Oh, and if you don't get my point about parliamentary system, sorry. It's a fairly new idea. Not everyone gets things fast enough and on the 1st explanation. Such is life.
Did you really think I hadn't noticed you were being sarcastic? You're dumber than you give yourself credit for!
Did you fail to see that I was mocking your uncalled-for smugness? I am beginning to question your super-smart-guy credentials. What a disappointment.
A PhD is not what I have that shows I'm super-smart
A patent? A non-self-published book, a peer-reviewed paper? A precedent-establishing legal argument? Anything which shows any original contribution to the collective knowledge of the civilization?
You're right about one thing, though -- I am super smart. Glad you noticed!
Oh, no. That was sarcasm on my part. Sorry, us dumb Republicans have a hard time expressing ourselves. So what's your PhD in, super smart guy?
Republicans are the ones who like buying shiny weapons. So that when we do go to war, very few of our soldiers die. Do you really think that without all the military spending we'd have less than 2% casualty rate in the war zones?
Yey! You can do sarcasm. You must be right on all the points. See what I did there? Cause you are super smart and I am just a dumb Republican.
I'd invite you to talk to book publishers and media companies and see what they think of the whole internet and google thing.
ha? I didn't say anything about race. I have to defend points I haven't made? Thanks for letting me know I suck at statistics. I'll work better to impress you next time, I guess. Just to be sure, I follow along, you are disagreeing with me, right? Otherwise, that was really gratuitous. And if you *are* disagreeing with me, on what exactly?
Umm? What? I don't know any Republican politician who wants being gay to be illegal. What's marriage got to do with sex, exactly? It's a property contract. Sure, people associate it with sex, but being married doesn't give a husband the right to have sex with his wife.... You can still be charged with rape if you are married, so... the only thing that a marriage contract actually controls is property rights. How do you extrapolate opposition to gay sex from opposition to gay marriage?
It's almost impossible that there is more than 3 candidates on super tuesday. So we'll see in a week.
Honestly, I really don't get how you can bothered by a few crazies planted into a peaceful demonstration in Ukraine who were spouting xenophobic slogans, but you are ok with the RF government turning RF into a fascist state. Why do you care to hate enemies of RF if its biggest enemies are its own government. They are the ones who have turned the country into a prison again.