[ILUG] looking for linux software people

[Ronan Waide]

On December 29, gavin at diva.ie said:
> Experience and knowledge (specific ways of doing things) are two very 
> different things.

Eh. Point to me the line between the two. As I said, if I take ten
different ways of doing something the first time around before I find
the one that works, I'm sure as hell going to go straight for #11 the
next time I find myself in the same situation. At which point you get
to decide if your theoretical IP restrictions apply to the
granualarity of a single line of code, a short bunch of lines, an
entire function, etc. etc. Software is a slippery beast, and you're
constantly going to run into this sort of thing if you attempt to
restrict it in arbitrary ways.

Note, I'm not saying that I regard NDAs and the like as pointless
pieces of documentation. More what I said originally; it's a grey
area, especially when you get down to trying to draw the line between
what's permitted and what's not. I tend to treat it from a broad
perspective myself, in that I will not carry actual code from one job
to the next, and while I've got a good memory I'm not going to
remember the exact sequence of code for everything I've ever
written. Rather in the scenario above I'll skip over the ten bad
methods and go straight for the eleventh because that's exactly what
I've been hired for.

Also, just to contradict your statement above in a more pedantic
fashion, Merriam-Webster describes "experience" as

  "2 a : practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct
   observation of or participation in events or in a particular
   activity"

and in the same source under "knowledge" I find

  "2 a (1) : the fact or condition of knowing something with
   familiarity gained through experience or association"

which makes knowledge and experience look about as easy to untangle as
what is and isn't permitted by a nebulous IP clause.

Cheers,
Waider.
-- 
waider at waider.ie / Yes, it /is/ very personal of me.
"Went to Lost World with Dave last nite before work. The two of us
 were destroyed and the movie sucked too. We are no longer in awe of
 dinosaurs." - Donal