Re: "Hartgen Consultancy, we'll Bury You In a Pile of US Legal Hell!"
@Figment: I agree with you that the Dictation Bridge people shouldn't have got nasty, but I completely disagree with you that legally threatening (because that's basically what this was, a threat) your valued and sadly-departed employee merely for choosing to work on a competing product, instead of (as one might hope) expecting them to adhere to the agreement they signed in good faith, is in any sense OK. At least Mr. Hartgen was honest in his blog post in advising his potential clients that he's not above legal intimidation of his employees as a strategy for keeping them on board:
I wrote to the tester. I did thank him for letting me know his intentions, and I praised him for the considerable amount of work and time he had invested since J-Say's inception. . I did say that I felt considerably betrayed, particularly as not only would he be potentially taking our ideas and concepts to an alternative project to further its cause, but we had in the past rewarded his testing time by providing him with copies of the software at no cost over a number of years. I went onto intimate that we may well seek legal advice, particularly if the concepts of design were identical to what we had developed. That too was very fair, and indeed we did take appropriate advice.
I'm quite sure Mr. Hartgen was being sincere in his _expression_ of regret, and probably isn't intending to be malicious or to do anything more than to ensure his legitimate business interests are being met, but the tone is needlessly petulant and acquisitive, and I can well imagine how a loud-mouth who caught news of this, particularly as a friend of the tester in question, might be pissed. I know I would be. Not, of course, to the extent of writing childishly inflammatory rants with no real force whatever, but probably to the extent of at least letting the project's users and developers know that a competitor was willing to use a legal instrument against a former developer of that competitor's product in the event that a feature happened to mimic one of their own, regardless of whether or not any trade secrets or code were plagiarised, just so they could avoid making any risky mistakes that might get them fingered. We don't recognise software patents around here, either, so I don't think there would actually be any way to protect what is claimed are protectable ideas. And I'm no lawyer, but I doubt very much that any duty of an employee to his employer includes unduly restricting trade, particularly if the features being imitated are not covered by any explicit "Intellectual Property" and are otherwise generally available. This is all common sense, of course.
So no, I don't think it was "Fair" at all, merely symptomatic of a rather unfortunate practice in the computing industry of using legal threats to get the outcome you want by bullyi ng (or threatening to bully) in the courts, which I dislike intensely. Even if it was only intended as a warning shot, it's a dick thing to do, and I'm going to count it against the company. It's a shame, too, because they really don't deserve the flack they're getting from the community for the type of product they sell, which I have no issue with at all.
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