[ILUG] looking for linux software people

[Gavin Henrick]

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>This is a huge grey area, since arguably if I worked on a helpdesk
>system in Job A and then wrote a helpdesk system in Job B, how do you
>prove, exactly, that I didn't use IP from A to complete B? 
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Not a grey area at all, if the contract with me prohibits you (within 
irish contract law) from doing so, then you cannot do so.

Any "key" knowledge you acquire working for a company, is their property 
and simply, using it again if the contracts prohibits it is illegal. A 
decent company would make sure your previous contracts dont infringe on 
their ownership of a project you are working on now.


>After all,
>the whole reason I get the jobs I do is because of the experience I
>have. Even without code reuse, there's still the simple fact that if I
>tried ten different ways to get A working before finding the right
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Experience and knowledge (specific ways of doing things) are two very 
different things.

>one, I can take that knowledge to B even if I'm redoing the actual
>code from scratch.
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Clean rooming is of course ok, but any code re-use invalidates this. The 
burden is on you to prove you clean roomed the new project.

Whether people like it or not, when someone pays 50k to make a bit of 
software they are entitled to protection for their product.
Anything novel, either in the creation or method, is protected by 
copyright, and coders who breach this basic copyright issue should spend 
some time inside.

>Cheers,
>Waider.
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