[ale] The risk of proprietary code: unemployment

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Friday 16 May 2003 02:01 am, Ray Knight wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-05-15 at 09:25, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> > Don Marti (Editor of the Linux Journal) has these interesting thoughts
> > in todays "Aspire to Crudeness" email about an often overlooked risk
> > to proprietary code:

<snip>

> >    It's summer break from college. If you're in Computer Science, and
> >    you're going back to a school that has Shared Source or other
> >    NDA-based access to source code, you'd better get hired by the one
> >    company whose code it is. Otherwise, be prepared to look for a job
> > at Borders or Noah's Bagels.
>
> This and SCO's lawsuit are both total horseshit.  There is no law
> (including copyright law) that prevents me from re-implementing code I
> have seen elsewhere unless I've signed a non-disclosure agreement (I
> never have and never will).  I can't copy the code, but I can sure as
> hell re-implement it.  And when I re-implement the code it will most
> likely be better, because so much code out there is not very efficient
> or robust.

If you reread the included paragraph you will see that is exactly what Don 
Marti was talking about.  Microsoft's so-called "shared source" is, I 
believe, NDA protected.  So if you look at it you might not be able to 
reimplement it.

I suspect that Don, as usual, overstates it a bit, but not as much as I'd 
like.

Michael
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale