There is a very grey line here .. maybe. Take this real life example:
We had a father/son team that worked for my company. The father was one of
the ones who helped start the company and greatly responisble for making it
successful durring its startup phase. As the company grew, the ideas about
how it should continue differed between one of the founders and the father.
The father eventually left on somewhat 'bad' terms. Soon after, his son
also left the company .. also on somewhat bad terms. The father joined a
company that made similar, but not competing products. Soon after, that
company decided to make a competing product. Luckily, the father knew the
industry, but not how the product was made. Unfortunately, the son worked
on the product itself and knew a fair bit about how it worked. The son had
some copies of the compiled code. He and a buddy managed to reverse
engineer it and (as far as we know), deliver the source code to the
competing company so they could "learn how the program worked". I'm sure
the intent was to learn how we did things and, ahem, build on those ideas.
Was this just leanring from another developer to learn how to dome something
better, or, was it plain code theft. Is there a difference in this case
(they were using a different language)?Luckily, they weren't too bright and
wasted time building a product for a market that was already at least 50%
saturated (a lot for market share among government agencies ;), so they
weren't much of a threat .. but still ....
Now .. most would certainly agree that this is just flat out wrong, ethicly
as well as legaly, but the grey area is .. how wrong is it, ethicly, to
reverse engineer a program to learn how another developer accomplished
something so that a particular way of doing things can be learned to build a
non competing product? What about just for personal knowledge?
It's starting to look like, it's just how you look at it ;)
Todd
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Mansel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "CF-Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 4:44 PM
Subject: RE: Need decryptor tag for CFUG presentation
> Well i'm not talking about plagerism, i'm talking about studying the code,
> how they made it work, etc, etc....then developing your own application,
> that is how a lot of us learned from bookes that we've bought, starting
out
> with cold fusion, I am sure most of us put in a few bits of code mentioned
> in forta's books, and tried it out, then took off with it right? That is
> what my majority point is.
>
> kev
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at
http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm
Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/cf-talk@houseoffusion.com/
Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
