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> "Huawei is alleged to have stolen source code for Company 1’s routers, which it then used in its own products." I've never really understood how IP theft wor

> "Huawei is alleged to have stolen source code for Company 1’s routers, which it then used in its own products." I've never really understood how IP theft works. I've been a software engineer for a long time and I know that Reading and making sense of an existing million line code base is a hella of a lot harder than just writing new code from scratch. Why on earth would anyone want to steal source code from a competitor?

lostmsu 7y ago
Million lines of code from scratch is not easy in any way. Especially if you are talking about battle-tested code, which had already faced and accounted for many corner cases.
- carlmr 7y ago
  Maybe the best way is to write it yourself and when you face an issue you try to see how they solved it? It's fairly doable to understand a small part of the code until you see what they needed to do. I wouldn't call it reading all the millions of lines,I agree with OP that that would most likely take longer.
sneak 7y ago
I encourage you to read this. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  That's a great article i read a long time ago. :) But, That's different. We're not talking about rewriting an existing codebase that already exists and has a ton of legacy behavior that needs to be maintained. They're supposedly writing new code with new functionality, and instead of writing it themselves, the implication is that they'd rather use someone else's smelly old legacy code, rather than write it themselves. I would love to have seen the look on those engineers faces when some spy dropped off the packet of code they were supposed to integrate. I just don't see that happening. Reading existing code bases is hard enough. But then to go and try to integrate another company's codebase into your own, especially if it's millions of lines of code, I'd say thanks but no thanks.

lostmsu 7y ago

Million lines of code from scratch is not easy in any way. Especially if you are talking about battle-tested code, which had already faced and accounted for many corner cases.

carlmr 7y ago
Maybe the best way is to write it yourself and when you face an issue you try to see how they solved it? It's fairly doable to understand a small part of the code until you see what they needed to do. I wouldn't call it reading all the millions of lines,I agree with OP that that would most likely take longer.

sneak 7y ago

I encourage you to read this. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
That's a great article i read a long time ago. :) But, That's different. We're not talking about rewriting an existing codebase that already exists and has a ton of legacy behavior that needs to be maintained. They're supposedly writing new code with new functionality, and instead of writing it themselves, the implication is that they'd rather use someone else's smelly old legacy code, rather than write it themselves. I would love to have seen the look on those engineers faces when some spy dropped off the packet of code they were supposed to integrate. I just don't see that happening. Reading existing code bases is hard enough. But then to go and try to integrate another company's codebase into your own, especially if it's millions of lines of code, I'd say thanks but no thanks.