Verily I say unto thee, that Richard Rasker spake thusly:
> The only "IP" angle is that there are often non-disclosure agreements
> involved, which bar me from offering a particular design to anyone
> but the first customer -- but within reasonable limits, of course.
> This latter usually boils down to the fact that I'm not allowed to
> sell a complete machine or functional circuit to anyone else without
> permission. I have no problems with that.
I've never been affected by NDAs that had anything to do with software
(company policies, yes - but not software).
Most of the systems I worked on were in heavy industry, were bespoke
hardware, and powered by bespoke software written by the engineers I
managed, and subsequently became the sole property of the client, were
never published to my knowledge, and remained unlicensed AFAIK.
That software would have been of zero value to anyone else, since it was
so specific to the bespoke embedded systems it was designed for, it's
doubtful if it would have even worked at all in different circumstances,
much less have been useful outside the limited scope of its implementation.
The supporting infrastructures (logging, monitoring, safety systems,
Intranet and other communications systems, etc.) were all Free Software
based. I occasionally encountered Netware in my travels, but never
worked on or with it in any way whatsoever. Most of the proprietary
systems I saw, by a vast margin, were one flavour or another of UNIX,
but again I never developed proprietary licensed software for them, nor
for any other system.
The nearest I ever came to contributing to any proprietary software was
several years ago, when I volunteered to help with documentation for a
music management program called Helium, which was (at that time) at a
very early stage of development. Even though the developers were
friendly enough, they absolutely insisted that I use some proprietary
document authoring and control software that only ran on Windows, and
then submit the results in a proprietary format (I can't remember),
whereas the workflow I was accustomed to utilised a series of scripts
I'd built up over the years, and produced any of a number of open format
results, including TeX and HTML, so I declined. End of story.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8
16:19:21 up 10 days, 20:17, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
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