3 ms·

Without a written contract you owned all of the code you wrote. You could have sent a cease and desist to the purchasing company and walked a way with a ton of

Without a written contract you owned all of the code you wrote. You could have sent a cease and desist to the purchasing company and walked a way with a ton of money, very easily* *As easy as a lawsuit ever is, I mean... it could have taken a couple years and about 100k investment, but likely they would have realized the problem and just settled.

praptak 16y ago
He'd have to prove he wrote the code. Which leads to an interesting question - what constitutes an admissible proof of code authorship? Is depth of knowledge of the codebase sufficient?
mkramlich 16y ago
except he was being paid a monthly salary and cashing checks which didn't bounce -- those are a form of documentation. Not to say I don't think he got screwed, because it sounds like he did. but i disagree that he necessarily owned all the code he wrote. because he was getting paid cash regularly for it.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  It would depend on the copyright laws in Holland at the time. I don't know that anyone here is sufficiently well-versed to determine that.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    I am and there is some truth to it, there were enough witnesses to the deal that I could have probably done that, and possibly would have prevailed. Don't forget that I was not the only person that got screwed out of his share, another key point would have been that my 'take home' was well below market rates, and that - until 'Fred' stripped out my name - there was a copyright notice in my name in the code and that I had about 500 subdirectories with backups of the code as it was developed (I didn't have any real version control). But frankly I didn't care enough about it to put that much negative energy in to it, court cases are extremely hard on the system. I simply chalked it up to experience and enjoyed my new project, which was building a very large scale message switch using QnX, it was my first experience in networked computers using message passing and a completely new world. The contrast with the other company was remarkable in every which way and Jan (the guy that owned the new place) and I are still friends today. The funny thing is that a couple of years later I employed him for a bit!
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    good point. I forgot it was Holland.

praptak 16y ago

He'd have to prove he wrote the code. Which leads to an interesting question - what constitutes an admissible proof of code authorship? Is depth of knowledge of the codebase sufficient?

mkramlich 16y ago

except he was being paid a monthly salary and cashing checks which didn't bounce -- those are a form of documentation. Not to say I don't think he got screwed, because it sounds like he did. but i disagree that he necessarily owned all the code he wrote. because he was getting paid cash regularly for it.

cookiecaper 16y ago
It would depend on the copyright laws in Holland at the time. I don't know that anyone here is sufficiently well-versed to determine that.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I am and there is some truth to it, there were enough witnesses to the deal that I could have probably done that, and possibly would have prevailed. Don't forget that I was not the only person that got screwed out of his share, another key point would have been that my 'take home' was well below market rates, and that - until 'Fred' stripped out my name - there was a copyright notice in my name in the code and that I had about 500 subdirectories with backups of the code as it was developed (I didn't have any real version control). But frankly I didn't care enough about it to put that much negative energy in to it, court cases are extremely hard on the system. I simply chalked it up to experience and enjoyed my new project, which was building a very large scale message switch using QnX, it was my first experience in networked computers using message passing and a completely new world. The contrast with the other company was remarkable in every which way and Jan (the guy that owned the new place) and I are still friends today. The funny thing is that a couple of years later I employed him for a bit!
- mkramlich 16y ago
  good point. I forgot it was Holland.