Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Alex Martelli wrote:
>> Not a bad point at all, although perhaps not entirely congruent to
>> open
>> source: hiring key developers has always been a possibility (net of
>> non-compete agreements, but I'm told California doesn't like those).
California places pretty strict limits on non-compete agreements. I
was at Ingres when their parent company - ASK - got bought by CA. CA
required people choosing to leave the company to sign an agreement
that included *their* standard non-compete clause before getting the
separation cash. Enough people left that found this clause irritating
that it got take to multiple lawyers. Every last one of them declared
it unenforceable in CA.
> The essential difference, it seems to me, is that buying the company
> gets you control over the company's proprietary technologies, whereas
> hiring the developer only gets you access to the development skills of
> the people who've been involved open source developments.
But it's not at all clear which of these is the more desirable
outcome. CA bought ASK to get control of Ingres, which their Unicenter
product used as a database. The *entire* server software development
group left, meaning CA had all the sources and technologies, but none
of the talent that created them. We called this the $300 million
source license.
CA pretty clearly got screwed on this deal. They have since
open-sourced the Ingres product.
<mike
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Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
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