[ILUG] looking for linux software people

[Liam Bedford]

On Sunday, Dec 29, 2002, at 20:53 Europe/Dublin, Gavin Henrick wrote:

>>
>>
>> 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?
> 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.
>
what about when the contract has expired? If I've left Job A, then 
there's not very much they can do about it. My understanding of EU law 
(very sketchy as it is) leads me to believe that stuff like "You're not 
allowed work on another helpdesk system for a year" is not legal, as it 
infringes your personal right to work on whatever you want.

>
>> 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
>>
> Experience and knowledge (specific ways of doing things) are two very 
> different things.
>
The problem is that in the US to date, people have been in trouble for 
that. They seem to have come up with a concept of intrinsic IP... so 
that the time I spent doing those ten ones wrong should be paid also by 
the second company.

>> one, I can take that knowledge to B even if I'm redoing the actual
>> code from scratch.
>>
> 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.
>
Not the way I understand copyright. Copyright is on a particular 
instance of code. The process cannot be protected by a patent in 
Europe, which is why the US is so upset with the European laws at the 
moment. In the US, you can quite happily patent the software process 
that goes on, and extort money from another company who happen to come 
up with the same way of doing things (or a similar way).

L.