I think the OP would like some help articulating the problem and that's why he posted here. Beating him to death asking him to articulate is a waste of time. If he could articulate it reasonably at all he wouldn't be HERE!
My $0.02 on the cloud and the reason why I will never store information there, encrypted, overseas, or not. However, I do see things like SaaS via the cloud as a boon. Allow me to explain with the comparison of using the cloud for services and storing information in the cloud.
I have a fundamental belief that our individual intellectual property should be protected as much as our freedom. I believe that our individual digital data should reside with us, be our individual responsibility to safeguard, and be ours to share with whomever we wish, whenever we wish.
I do not believe that your data is ever safe in the hands of someone else, especially, if that someone else is a for-profit business. I do not see encryption being a viable option for data that is stored for long periods of time. Why? Well the people storing your data and that of thousands if not millions of others will most likely have the compute ability to break that encryption. Plus, all encryption does is draw more attention to your data in a for-profit environment. "What are they hiding?"
I do believe that software as a services, e.g., Office365, Google Apps, et al, are a good thing if implemented well. Tools to use in the cloud are good because data is not stored for long periods of time, and if the terms of service are good your data remains private while it is being manipulated in the cloud.
I do believe that storing items in the cloud temporarily because you are sharing them with someone is ok, again, terms of service become the deciding factor. If the data is with you and you have a machine attached to the Internet it's really silly to use an external service to share things, but it may be more secure as you are not compelled to run a service on your home machine where the whole of your data resides. That all depends on your level of server admin competency. Regular home users should probably use a service.
It is difficult to ride the line between privacy and having a life in the modern digital society. If you choose the way of privacy in today's world you will most likely alienate a major group of friends. The drive for young adults to belong and form peer groups is not easily bounded. I think the best the OP could hope to do is to try to educate the parents of the privacy and future implications and hope that gets passed onto their children at home. The teachers and administration will also need to be educated about the possible issues. The bottom line here is educate people so they can make an informed decision on their own. I did say that freedom was also equally important to protect. If people still choose to be reckless after knowing the dangers then they will have to live with the consequences of that choice. I do believe there will be a large segment of our population that will deeply regret how reckless they have been with their privacy.
The only tricky part is finding a job you will like.
I believe there's a rule in the US, wherein if someone likes their job that indicates a management mistake. Whenever my job starts to not suck, management messes with it so it sucks again.
No, you're confused. That's just BAD management! That's universal.
Please Mod the parent up. He's the only one that got the Tucker reference to where the laws originally came from.
Laws that protect auto dealerships aren't newly created for Tesla, though...
Nope, a lot of them were created to kill Tucker in the late-1940s. Luckily, Elon has a few other hits to back him up so even if the automotive industry quashes Tesla's dreams he's still got rockets and Paypal.
It's personal property. It's not contraband. You are allowed to own back-up copies of your CD's and DVD's. Do you really think that they would make everyone empty out their iphones and mp3 players, or go through them track by track to see if they match a purchase at the itunes store or whatever? No. Well actually the way the US is acting nowadays - maybe...
No, but you're confusing something that I actually wanted to bring up and haven't seen (yet, still scrolling). The ability to backup isn't in question here, it's the source of the files and how he proves it. If the music/movie/whatever is part of an iTunes or similar music app tied to a legal store library on the users machine (or on an iDevice) I could see Customs not caring. If they see a random external hard drive with hundreds of ripped files with extensions like MKV, RAR, etc. then you might have an issue trying to explain how those files were yours from legal media. Of course, the Customs agents would need to get to the point of actually wanting or needing to go through your equipment to begin with. Basically, I don't think you'll have a problem if you do something like import them into iTunes, at least for transport. Doing something like encrypting them just draws too much attention to them and then you have a another big stink. You may also want to back them up and leave a hard drive in Australia, maybe in a safety deposit box, just in case you have to erase your library.
they don't send H1-B applicant's home after their visas expire. So while there's only suppose to be about 60,000 here there's more like 3 times that. And they want to bump the minimum to 300,000. Try to imagine close to 1 million new tech workers hitting the job market in 3 years...
And everyone seems to forget the two wars the U.S. has been in and the veterans coming home and needing jobs. Talk about flooded job markets! It's hard to switch jobs right now, but looking.
How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them?
Easy, don't put them on the Internet or computer. You see they have these things called pens and pencils and this other stuff called paper. You want something hidden from electronic surveillance, don't make it electronic.
Not only that, but it lacks the features to exploit. Which is actually an important point in security, to only have the features you need and nothing else. Less surface area to attack.
That's why my computer resides in a quantum singularity and I access it via entangled electrons that cannot be tapped. When we can do that, our computers will be secure!
Tor is fine, except that most end points are likely run by the likes of the NSA and FBI...
CORRECTION:...most end points are known by EVERYONE! If they were secret you couldn't find them to use. Like the NSA can't load Tor themselves and just look at them all. Duh! You make it sound like Tor is something people at the NSA don't know about. LOL
You forgot that you also have to craft your own CPU.
Ever wondered why CPU's didn't get any faster than 3.5 to 4 GHz?
That's right, the NSA has since crammed in so many "features" that it became technically impossible to make them run any faster.
This spoken by someone with absolutely zero knowledge of electrical engineering.
Two questions: 1.), What are you smoking? 2.), Where do you get it?
Of course you can win. All you have do is to build up a massive surveillance system yourself. Then you know exactly who is trying to listen to you with which methods, and can enact appropriate counter measures.:-)
Sure, you'd just need to at least outspend the U.S. govt on that front. Good luck. It was $80 billion in 2010. Bill Gates can't even afford that, annually.
Ummm, you don't need a back door when you have a few data centers the size of football fields that can be dedicated to breaking any encryption. Back doors are mostly Hollywood stuff these days, or was that Palm Springs?
I always love how people simultaneously believe that the NSA is so technically brilliant that it can collect and analyze every message sent by every random person on earth, but also so stupid that they name their secret backdoor key _NSAKEY.
No shit! I am laughing at most of the comments to this. Especially, those that think anything actually attached to the Internet is in any way secure from an agency like the NSA and DHS. ROFLMFAO The only system that's secured is off, in a safe at an undisclosed location. And today, you better hope you didn't tell yourself where that was because they might try to torture it out of you.
You can bet that any browser worth its salt has had agents involved in its creation whether or not the people who built the product were aware of it at all. You can also bet that encryption products whether free or commercial often have back doors or keys built in. That is the very essence of intelligence gathering. Do not assume that physical or software products are free of snooping abilities.
I suppose your best chance might be a browser that was never popular or used by many people at all.
Think back a few years and recall the tunnel that we put under the Berlin Wall in order to tie into a major Soviet phone trunk line. We intercepted phone calls for years from that tunnel. If we could do that about 1968 or 1970 just imagine what could be done today. DARPA was the motive force behind the creation of the net. DARPA more than any other entity would have great reason to spy on communications. This is not a new issue.
Dude, drop the mushrooms and take off the tin foil hat. First, DARPA is NOT a spy agency and the only one that deals with communications is the NSA. And no, browser development teams do not have DHS spies working among them. Wow, that's out there! As for encryption, most of those algorithms were developed by academics. Sure, some funded by security agencies, but not all. Most encryption funded that way has back doors, but most back doors aren't needed anymore because the NSA can brute force most of it with the resources they have. And I love the security through obscurity meme that just shows how little you really know. The only secure browser is the one not browsing the Internet. Just like the only secure computer is the one that's off, locked in a safe at an undisclosed location. We funded these agencies to watch other countries and protect our interests. We funded them to have the best resources available and be more than capable of performing the tasks they were instructed to do. The problem is our elected officials, that are the best corporate donations can buy, have now turned those resources on the ones that elected them and that's not right. Looking for a secure browser is ignoring the root cause of the problem, and irrational, uniformed paranoia doesn't help the situation when there's plenty to really be upset about.
Ask Slashdot: Most Secure Browser In an Age of Surveillance?
The one that's browsing a network server NOT on the Internet. How do you think the NSA and CIA do it? Completely separate networks and computers attached to them. Only way...
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There are disorders of the brain and inner ear that can upset the body through visual stimulus, epilepsy being one of the more common ones, but there are different forms and varying degrees of epileptic conditions. I do think that WiFi sickness is a bunch of hooey, but refresh of light sources is a known and scientifically documented problem for some people. Despite what you may think we're not all the same even though humans have the same parts. All kinds of things can go really wonky if one little genetic bit gets flipped the wrong way. I am not saying that the OP is making this up, as he very well may have a medical condition that makes him sensitive to visual stimulus, but this is definitely not a "common" problem and is something he really needs to get diagnosed properly.
The problem is that your right maybe someone else's breach of freedom. That's always the issue.
E.g. You eat peanuts, the guy beside you is allergic. He has to leave the event because he can't be within 20 metres of peanuts...
Collection of information can protect citizens from crooks but also impede on said individuals privacy. Which one is more important? Is there a balance?
Ok, first, the government cannot give you Rights. Rights cannot be taken away. (see YouTube for George Carlin) I know, it's called the Bill of Rights, but it's not. It's a list of vaguely defined privileges each citizen is given and can be taken away. Yes, legally taken away through the Courts or legislation. Sorry, it's true.
Everyone deserves to have the same privileges, the problem is not everyone wants the same things and not everyone can (as in "able to") exercise their privileges either by choice, illness, injury, birth defect, etc. Are they being oppressed or denied anything? No, they just don't want or can't use a privilege granted them by the government. To use your example, the guy eating peanuts in a public place with no expectation of privacy or primacy can do so unimpeded. If someone gets near and has an allergy, you already gave the civil outcome to that, he moves away from the peanut source and continues exercising his privilege of being at the same public event. The guy with the allergy has to be more aware of his environment, but his "rights" are not impinged because someone else at the same public event is eating peanuts. There's no law against eating peanuts.
Finally, can there be a balance? Sure, as long as all parties get along. As long as people are educated about what their PRIVILEGES are and what the difference is between them and RIGHTS. They learn to find ways to live with each other rather than kill each other. They mature in their world view to incorporate the viewpoints of others. We the People are the government in the United States, something our recent political discourse seems to have forgotten to mention. It's not an US versus THEM situation because WE ARE THEM AND US! We just need to find a way to protect our privileges without wiping out all the ones that protect our freedom.
I do not like what's happened to the United States since 9/11. I think we went completely off the hinges and instead of pulling back once the major conflicts were over we plunged deeper into the paranoid abyss. When FISA gets taken out of the picture something bad is going on. BTW, the NSA can break just about any commercially available encryption out there (Hi boys! [waves]), so the "goodluckwiththat" tag for this story is absolutely fitting. You'd be better off hiding data in wheels of cheese like the guy above.
If the copyright message is pointing to the maintainer rather than the company, you may want to point it out to the company since the new developer may be trying to claim ownership of the code (or may simply be naive).
Yeah, that's the right path but it's probably too late.
What the OP should have done - ethically and legally - is obtain permission from the previous client before applying for new jobs. That way he's done the right thing to start with. And if an unforeseen circumstance like this one or any other snag comes up, he can simply say "no problem, I can give you a contact name at the client I write this for. I've already spoken to them an have permission to use this code as a reference so I'm sure they'll be able to satisfy your concern."
Did I mention it's too late? Because he didn't bother to do the right thing in the first place.
"Typically, the duration of copyright is the whole life of the creator plus fifty to a hundred years from the creator's death, or a finite period for anonymous or corporate creations."
The guy doesn't need copyright (which he probably doesn't even have in this case), he just needs credit for his work. I'd be very careful to even mention the word "legal" or "copyright". Imagine that you, as a manager or an employer, get a phone call about disputed copyright on a bit of software you had done way back when. What do you do? That's right, you refer the matter to your lawyer/legal department. Nothing good will come of that.
If you parted ways with your former employer on good terms, just call them and ask they they would mind giving you a nice written reference, specifically mentioning your contribution to that software.
Agree: this is more about credit than about copyright.
If you had built a bridge for your city, you should be able to list that as one of your accomplishments. It does not mean that you can walk off with the bridge. At the same time, you'd be perfectly justified in getting pissed off if someone else said that it was they, not you, who had built it.
Do you know what copyright even means?!?! Clearly you don't. Copyright is how you secure credit for something you created. You boys are DENSE.
Inkscape is free and already as good as Illustrator.
I like to advocate FOSS solutions too, but I like to tell the truth while I do so. Illustrator is better than Inkscape, but Inkscape is good enough.
Ok, again, for whom is InkScape good enough? The casual graphics user/sysadmin? Sure. For the professional designer? Hardly. How does InkScape interoperate with other design applications? How well does it support large format printers from multiple vendors? Does it support the PANTONE color matching system (this is a BIG one for us)? Does it support PostScript Level 3? If any of the answers to those questions is negative, it's a no-go.
Who said anything about Gimp? Corel makes products that are highly competitive with Adobe's. Inkscape is free and already as good as Illustrator. There are tons of audio editors as good as or better than Audition and the same goes for Premiere. HTML5 is supplanting Flash.
So what exactly does Adobe have that can't be replaced?
InDiesgn on the Mac, for one. I'm not in a Windows-only shop. I am in a design school. Inkscape is NOT as good as Illustrator, despite your and others' assertions. There are no mature tools for HTML5 development as HTML5 is hardly mature as a standard. I have used multiple audio tools over the years, but that's irrelevant as I am not in the audio engineering/music department. Most of what my students need are in the Design side of the house and I'm sorry there aren't a lot of choices. I know, I have been looking for months, since the stirrings on campus about the Adobe license changes. Just looking at feature sets for apps isn't a good comparison in and of itself. I need to know how the apps interoperate as that is critical to a designer's workflow. I need to know what things the students AREN'T going to be able to do without the Adobe product and determine the impact that will have. You make it sound like, "Oh just switch apps and everything will be fine," uhhhh, no not so much. You're talking about changing an entire workflow, adding layers of support and dealing with multiple vendors (if any as FOSS has none). Plus, I have no idea what effect this will have on the output side as the students will also be printing from all these new apps on a regular basis to large format printers. What features are they losing there? I can tell you that Adobe has put considerable resources into the print process features in their design apps and that replacing those features is going to be much, much harder. At least one department I support grants professional degrees (B. Arch.) and the students are required to print a book. Other than things like Quark Express (Windows only) and TeX (not gonna happen for these kids) there isn't much option.
...and inform them of the unethical behavior of the new developer, the situation it put you in and how shocked you were to find that they had deprived you of the opportunity to take credit for your work. Somebody at that company hired you and knows what truly happened. Hopefully that person is in a position to put the situation right and give you the credit you are due.
That said, relying on your code being still accessible after you have left it for a while is not a situation you want to be in. Your former clients can take that code down and replace it any time they want, with anything they want. You should have checked to see the status of that code yourself shortly before you tried to present it as an example of your work.
I agree with most of what you said and I would add that I would explain to the client that the actions of their new developer have put them in an actionable (take you to court) position as well as the new developer that is clearly in deep to the count of fraud and copyright violation. You need to speak with a copyright lawyer, pronto, to understand what your options actually are. I know you're not looking for a fight, but it seems one that's worth fighting has found you. As a developer the most important thing to you is your code. If someone is stealing that and claiming it as their own they are burying you if you don't fight. I assure you if the places were reversed you'd be hearing from a lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw, "D.C. Awards Obamacare IT Work To Offshore Outsourcer" and immediately thought, IBM?
I think the OP would like some help articulating the problem and that's why he posted here. Beating him to death asking him to articulate is a waste of time. If he could articulate it reasonably at all he wouldn't be HERE!
My $0.02 on the cloud and the reason why I will never store information there, encrypted, overseas, or not. However, I do see things like SaaS via the cloud as a boon. Allow me to explain with the comparison of using the cloud for services and storing information in the cloud.
I have a fundamental belief that our individual intellectual property should be protected as much as our freedom. I believe that our individual digital data should reside with us, be our individual responsibility to safeguard, and be ours to share with whomever we wish, whenever we wish.
I do not believe that your data is ever safe in the hands of someone else, especially, if that someone else is a for-profit business. I do not see encryption being a viable option for data that is stored for long periods of time. Why? Well the people storing your data and that of thousands if not millions of others will most likely have the compute ability to break that encryption. Plus, all encryption does is draw more attention to your data in a for-profit environment. "What are they hiding?"
I do believe that software as a services, e.g., Office365, Google Apps, et al, are a good thing if implemented well. Tools to use in the cloud are good because data is not stored for long periods of time, and if the terms of service are good your data remains private while it is being manipulated in the cloud.
I do believe that storing items in the cloud temporarily because you are sharing them with someone is ok, again, terms of service become the deciding factor. If the data is with you and you have a machine attached to the Internet it's really silly to use an external service to share things, but it may be more secure as you are not compelled to run a service on your home machine where the whole of your data resides. That all depends on your level of server admin competency. Regular home users should probably use a service.
It is difficult to ride the line between privacy and having a life in the modern digital society. If you choose the way of privacy in today's world you will most likely alienate a major group of friends. The drive for young adults to belong and form peer groups is not easily bounded. I think the best the OP could hope to do is to try to educate the parents of the privacy and future implications and hope that gets passed onto their children at home. The teachers and administration will also need to be educated about the possible issues. The bottom line here is educate people so they can make an informed decision on their own. I did say that freedom was also equally important to protect. If people still choose to be reckless after knowing the dangers then they will have to live with the consequences of that choice. I do believe there will be a large segment of our population that will deeply regret how reckless they have been with their privacy.
Then let there be walls! DRM be damned.
The only tricky part is finding a job you will like.
I believe there's a rule in the US, wherein if someone likes their job that indicates a management mistake. Whenever my job starts to not suck, management messes with it so it sucks again.
No, you're confused. That's just BAD management! That's universal.
Make sure you include "Destructive testing of competitors' products" as part of your skillset.
Destructive testing of competitors as part of your skillset.
FTFY
For those of you who do hiring, what is the best way to sell this type of background?
MANAGER: How are the skills you acquired during your term of service in the military relevant to this position?
Or, find an airline that's hiring.
Please Mod the parent up. He's the only one that got the Tucker reference to where the laws originally came from.
Laws that protect auto dealerships aren't newly created for Tesla, though ...
Nope, a lot of them were created to kill Tucker in the late-1940s. Luckily, Elon has a few other hits to back him up so even if the automotive industry quashes Tesla's dreams he's still got rockets and Paypal.
It's personal property. It's not contraband. You are allowed to own back-up copies of your CD's and DVD's. Do you really think that they would make everyone empty out their iphones and mp3 players, or go through them track by track to see if they match a purchase at the itunes store or whatever? No. Well actually the way the US is acting nowadays - maybe...
No, but you're confusing something that I actually wanted to bring up and haven't seen (yet, still scrolling). The ability to backup isn't in question here, it's the source of the files and how he proves it. If the music/movie/whatever is part of an iTunes or similar music app tied to a legal store library on the users machine (or on an iDevice) I could see Customs not caring. If they see a random external hard drive with hundreds of ripped files with extensions like MKV, RAR, etc. then you might have an issue trying to explain how those files were yours from legal media. Of course, the Customs agents would need to get to the point of actually wanting or needing to go through your equipment to begin with. Basically, I don't think you'll have a problem if you do something like import them into iTunes, at least for transport. Doing something like encrypting them just draws too much attention to them and then you have a another big stink. You may also want to back them up and leave a hard drive in Australia, maybe in a safety deposit box, just in case you have to erase your library.
they don't send H1-B applicant's home after their visas expire. So while there's only suppose to be about 60,000 here there's more like 3 times that. And they want to bump the minimum to 300,000. Try to imagine close to 1 million new tech workers hitting the job market in 3 years...
And everyone seems to forget the two wars the U.S. has been in and the veterans coming home and needing jobs. Talk about flooded job markets! It's hard to switch jobs right now, but looking.
How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them?
Easy, don't put them on the Internet or computer. You see they have these things called pens and pencils and this other stuff called paper. You want something hidden from electronic surveillance, don't make it electronic.
Not only that, but it lacks the features to exploit. Which is actually an important point in security, to only have the features you need and nothing else. Less surface area to attack.
That's why my computer resides in a quantum singularity and I access it via entangled electrons that cannot be tapped. When we can do that, our computers will be secure!
Tor is fine, except that most end points are likely run by the likes of the NSA and FBI...
CORRECTION: ...most end points are known by EVERYONE! If they were secret you couldn't find them to use. Like the NSA can't load Tor themselves and just look at them all. Duh! You make it sound like Tor is something people at the NSA don't know about. LOL
You forgot that you also have to craft your own CPU.
Ever wondered why CPU's didn't get any faster than 3.5 to 4 GHz? That's right, the NSA has since crammed in so many "features" that it became technically impossible to make them run any faster.
This spoken by someone with absolutely zero knowledge of electrical engineering. Two questions: 1.), What are you smoking? 2.), Where do you get it?
Of course you can win. All you have do is to build up a massive surveillance system yourself. Then you know exactly who is trying to listen to you with which methods, and can enact appropriate counter measures. :-)
Sure, you'd just need to at least outspend the U.S. govt on that front. Good luck. It was $80 billion in 2010. Bill Gates can't even afford that, annually.
Ummm, you don't need a back door when you have a few data centers the size of football fields that can be dedicated to breaking any encryption. Back doors are mostly Hollywood stuff these days, or was that Palm Springs?
I always love how people simultaneously believe that the NSA is so technically brilliant that it can collect and analyze every message sent by every random person on earth, but also so stupid that they name their secret backdoor key _NSAKEY.
No shit! I am laughing at most of the comments to this. Especially, those that think anything actually attached to the Internet is in any way secure from an agency like the NSA and DHS. ROFLMFAO The only system that's secured is off, in a safe at an undisclosed location. And today, you better hope you didn't tell yourself where that was because they might try to torture it out of you.
You can bet that any browser worth its salt has had agents involved in its creation whether or not the people who built the product were aware of it at all. You can also bet that encryption products whether free or commercial often have back doors or keys built in. That is the very essence of intelligence gathering. Do not assume that physical or software products are free of snooping abilities. I suppose your best chance might be a browser that was never popular or used by many people at all. Think back a few years and recall the tunnel that we put under the Berlin Wall in order to tie into a major Soviet phone trunk line. We intercepted phone calls for years from that tunnel. If we could do that about 1968 or 1970 just imagine what could be done today. DARPA was the motive force behind the creation of the net. DARPA more than any other entity would have great reason to spy on communications. This is not a new issue.
Dude, drop the mushrooms and take off the tin foil hat. First, DARPA is NOT a spy agency and the only one that deals with communications is the NSA. And no, browser development teams do not have DHS spies working among them. Wow, that's out there! As for encryption, most of those algorithms were developed by academics. Sure, some funded by security agencies, but not all. Most encryption funded that way has back doors, but most back doors aren't needed anymore because the NSA can brute force most of it with the resources they have. And I love the security through obscurity meme that just shows how little you really know. The only secure browser is the one not browsing the Internet. Just like the only secure computer is the one that's off, locked in a safe at an undisclosed location. We funded these agencies to watch other countries and protect our interests. We funded them to have the best resources available and be more than capable of performing the tasks they were instructed to do. The problem is our elected officials, that are the best corporate donations can buy, have now turned those resources on the ones that elected them and that's not right. Looking for a secure browser is ignoring the root cause of the problem, and irrational, uniformed paranoia doesn't help the situation when there's plenty to really be upset about.
Ask Slashdot: Most Secure Browser In an Age of Surveillance?
The one that's browsing a network server NOT on the Internet. How do you think the NSA and CIA do it? Completely separate networks and computers attached to them. Only way...
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There are disorders of the brain and inner ear that can upset the body through visual stimulus, epilepsy being one of the more common ones, but there are different forms and varying degrees of epileptic conditions. I do think that WiFi sickness is a bunch of hooey, but refresh of light sources is a known and scientifically documented problem for some people. Despite what you may think we're not all the same even though humans have the same parts. All kinds of things can go really wonky if one little genetic bit gets flipped the wrong way. I am not saying that the OP is making this up, as he very well may have a medical condition that makes him sensitive to visual stimulus, but this is definitely not a "common" problem and is something he really needs to get diagnosed properly.
The problem is that your right maybe someone else's breach of freedom. That's always the issue.
E.g. You eat peanuts, the guy beside you is allergic. He has to leave the event because he can't be within 20 metres of peanuts...
Collection of information can protect citizens from crooks but also impede on said individuals privacy. Which one is more important? Is there a balance?
Ok, first, the government cannot give you Rights. Rights cannot be taken away. (see YouTube for George Carlin) I know, it's called the Bill of Rights, but it's not. It's a list of vaguely defined privileges each citizen is given and can be taken away. Yes, legally taken away through the Courts or legislation. Sorry, it's true.
Everyone deserves to have the same privileges, the problem is not everyone wants the same things and not everyone can (as in "able to") exercise their privileges either by choice, illness, injury, birth defect, etc. Are they being oppressed or denied anything? No, they just don't want or can't use a privilege granted them by the government. To use your example, the guy eating peanuts in a public place with no expectation of privacy or primacy can do so unimpeded. If someone gets near and has an allergy, you already gave the civil outcome to that, he moves away from the peanut source and continues exercising his privilege of being at the same public event. The guy with the allergy has to be more aware of his environment, but his "rights" are not impinged because someone else at the same public event is eating peanuts. There's no law against eating peanuts.
Finally, can there be a balance? Sure, as long as all parties get along. As long as people are educated about what their PRIVILEGES are and what the difference is between them and RIGHTS. They learn to find ways to live with each other rather than kill each other. They mature in their world view to incorporate the viewpoints of others. We the People are the government in the United States, something our recent political discourse seems to have forgotten to mention. It's not an US versus THEM situation because WE ARE THEM AND US! We just need to find a way to protect our privileges without wiping out all the ones that protect our freedom.
I do not like what's happened to the United States since 9/11. I think we went completely off the hinges and instead of pulling back once the major conflicts were over we plunged deeper into the paranoid abyss. When FISA gets taken out of the picture something bad is going on. BTW, the NSA can break just about any commercially available encryption out there (Hi boys! [waves]), so the "goodluckwiththat" tag for this story is absolutely fitting. You'd be better off hiding data in wheels of cheese like the guy above.
Get a referral from the company.
If the copyright message is pointing to the maintainer rather than the company, you may want to point it out to the company since the new developer may be trying to claim ownership of the code (or may simply be naive).
Yeah, that's the right path but it's probably too late. What the OP should have done - ethically and legally - is obtain permission from the previous client before applying for new jobs. That way he's done the right thing to start with. And if an unforeseen circumstance like this one or any other snag comes up, he can simply say "no problem, I can give you a contact name at the client I write this for. I've already spoken to them an have permission to use this code as a reference so I'm sure they'll be able to satisfy your concern." Did I mention it's too late? Because he didn't bother to do the right thing in the first place.
"Typically, the duration of copyright is the whole life of the creator plus fifty to a hundred years from the creator's death, or a finite period for anonymous or corporate creations."
It's not too late.
The guy doesn't need copyright (which he probably doesn't even have in this case), he just needs credit for his work. I'd be very careful to even mention the word "legal" or "copyright". Imagine that you, as a manager or an employer, get a phone call about disputed copyright on a bit of software you had done way back when. What do you do? That's right, you refer the matter to your lawyer/legal department. Nothing good will come of that. If you parted ways with your former employer on good terms, just call them and ask they they would mind giving you a nice written reference, specifically mentioning your contribution to that software.
Agree: this is more about credit than about copyright.
If you had built a bridge for your city, you should be able to list that as one of your accomplishments. It does not mean that you can walk off with the bridge. At the same time, you'd be perfectly justified in getting pissed off if someone else said that it was they, not you, who had built it.
Do you know what copyright even means?!?! Clearly you don't. Copyright is how you secure credit for something you created. You boys are DENSE.
Inkscape is free and already as good as Illustrator.
I like to advocate FOSS solutions too, but I like to tell the truth while I do so. Illustrator is better than Inkscape, but Inkscape is good enough.
Ok, again, for whom is InkScape good enough? The casual graphics user/sysadmin? Sure. For the professional designer? Hardly. How does InkScape interoperate with other design applications? How well does it support large format printers from multiple vendors? Does it support the PANTONE color matching system (this is a BIG one for us)? Does it support PostScript Level 3? If any of the answers to those questions is negative, it's a no-go.
Who said anything about Gimp? Corel makes products that are highly competitive with Adobe's. Inkscape is free and already as good as Illustrator. There are tons of audio editors as good as or better than Audition and the same goes for Premiere. HTML5 is supplanting Flash. So what exactly does Adobe have that can't be replaced?
InDiesgn on the Mac, for one. I'm not in a Windows-only shop. I am in a design school. Inkscape is NOT as good as Illustrator, despite your and others' assertions. There are no mature tools for HTML5 development as HTML5 is hardly mature as a standard. I have used multiple audio tools over the years, but that's irrelevant as I am not in the audio engineering/music department. Most of what my students need are in the Design side of the house and I'm sorry there aren't a lot of choices. I know, I have been looking for months, since the stirrings on campus about the Adobe license changes. Just looking at feature sets for apps isn't a good comparison in and of itself. I need to know how the apps interoperate as that is critical to a designer's workflow. I need to know what things the students AREN'T going to be able to do without the Adobe product and determine the impact that will have. You make it sound like, "Oh just switch apps and everything will be fine," uhhhh, no not so much. You're talking about changing an entire workflow, adding layers of support and dealing with multiple vendors (if any as FOSS has none). Plus, I have no idea what effect this will have on the output side as the students will also be printing from all these new apps on a regular basis to large format printers. What features are they losing there? I can tell you that Adobe has put considerable resources into the print process features in their design apps and that replacing those features is going to be much, much harder. At least one department I support grants professional degrees (B. Arch.) and the students are required to print a book. Other than things like Quark Express (Windows only) and TeX (not gonna happen for these kids) there isn't much option.
...and inform them of the unethical behavior of the new developer, the situation it put you in and how shocked you were to find that they had deprived you of the opportunity to take credit for your work. Somebody at that company hired you and knows what truly happened. Hopefully that person is in a position to put the situation right and give you the credit you are due.
That said, relying on your code being still accessible after you have left it for a while is not a situation you want to be in. Your former clients can take that code down and replace it any time they want, with anything they want. You should have checked to see the status of that code yourself shortly before you tried to present it as an example of your work.
I agree with most of what you said and I would add that I would explain to the client that the actions of their new developer have put them in an actionable (take you to court) position as well as the new developer that is clearly in deep to the count of fraud and copyright violation. You need to speak with a copyright lawyer, pronto, to understand what your options actually are. I know you're not looking for a fight, but it seems one that's worth fighting has found you. As a developer the most important thing to you is your code. If someone is stealing that and claiming it as their own they are burying you if you don't fight. I assure you if the places were reversed you'd be hearing from a lawyer.