I have never had or heard of a contract situation where I could go off and build a competing product after being acquired by a competitor. Stuff gets locked up.

I have never had or heard of a contract situation where I could go off and build a competing product after being acquired by a competitor. Stuff gets locked up. This practice is one of the reasons behind some open source movements - the protection of inventions from getting annihilated in the event of takeover. These articles do not include the detail that Facebook (or whoever) released the source code of the acquired product into the public domain. They include the detail that the products were killed.