5 ms·

So you wasted their time and money writing “traps” in the code? Sounds really unethical.

by eloisius 5y ago

arthurcolle 5y ago
You sound like someone that owns a lot of equity at the place you work at - congratulations! Bellum omnium contra omnes
- eloisius 5y ago
  If by the place I work at you mean nowhere, yes I own a lot of equity there. But in my past employment and contracting relationships, equity or not, I can't imagine shipping code with kill switches or booby traps that weren't in the spec or otherwise requested by the person I was working for.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Welcome to the world of business. Usually the developer gets taken advantage of because they assumed the world to be fair and equal and companies to have your best interest. In this case the developer got wind of an attempt to take advantage of him. He put in protection to prevent this. That's what a company would do. To not understanding why someone needed do that strikes me as a bit naive.
noduerme 5y ago
To be fair, the kill switches were mostly to prevent decompilation and reverse engineering. And I added them on my own time after I learned of the pending sale, which no one had consulted me about, and before the company took control of the servers, which I was administering. Was it worth my time? Absolutely. The people who sold the company intentionally misrepresented what they actually owned. They only owned the final compiled software they had purchased, and the right to use and repair or modify it. They didn't have a right to sell the source code, and I had no obligation to make it easy for the buyer to reverse engineer it.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Lesson learnt: If I had consultants, I’d ask for open-source delivery. Which has the side-effect of also advancing humanity, so we all win.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Is that even a lesson that needs to be learnt? Nuts not to, surely? Even this sort of issue aside, what happens when you want to add a feature and for whatever reason (that could include the original author's retirement or death!) hire someone else? Binary delivery seems like buying some cool-looking alien device that manufacturers widgets; you have no idea how it works or how to maintain it, so you just sell widgets hoping it keeps working without maintenance.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      Imagine you're a company looking for software as a cloud service. Suppose the best software for the purpose only does 70% of what you want. So you contact the company who runs that cloud service and pay them to develop the additional features and specific business logic you need. Then you contract with them to manage private servers with your build on them. At no point have you seen or purchased source code - not even for the 30% new features that were written on your behalf. Those are entwined with, and only work as a result of, the other 70%. You're basically using a black box that's maintained by another company, and trusting in that company's competence and goodwill. That's essentially what the situation was here. If you sold your company and touted your special build of the software as a feature, and passed the contract along to the buyer, that would be fine. But if you misrepresented the situation and said you owned 100% of the code and were selling that along with the right to distribute it, that would be fraud. Of course, you could have gone the more expensive route and hired your own team of coders to write the whole thing from scratch, under whatever license you wanted, and then you would own the source. But if a company needs document software or meeting software in the cloud, how many pay to reinvent the wheel and roll their own?

So you wasted their time and money writing “traps” in the code? Sounds really unethical.

arthurcolle 5y ago

You sound like someone that owns a lot of equity at the place you work at - congratulations! Bellum omnium contra omnes

eloisius 5y ago
If by the place I work at you mean nowhere, yes I own a lot of equity there. But in my past employment and contracting relationships, equity or not, I can't imagine shipping code with kill switches or booby traps that weren't in the spec or otherwise requested by the person I was working for.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Welcome to the world of business. Usually the developer gets taken advantage of because they assumed the world to be fair and equal and companies to have your best interest. In this case the developer got wind of an attempt to take advantage of him. He put in protection to prevent this. That's what a company would do. To not understanding why someone needed do that strikes me as a bit naive.

noduerme 5y ago

To be fair, the kill switches were mostly to prevent decompilation and reverse engineering. And I added them on my own time after I learned of the pending sale, which no one had consulted me about, and before the company took control of the servers, which I was administering. Was it worth my time? Absolutely. The people who sold the company intentionally misrepresented what they actually owned. They only owned the final compiled software they had purchased, and the right to use and repair or modify it. They didn't have a right to sell the source code, and I had no obligation to make it easy for the buyer to reverse engineer it.

laurent92 5y ago
Lesson learnt: If I had consultants, I’d ask for open-source delivery. Which has the side-effect of also advancing humanity, so we all win.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Is that even a lesson that needs to be learnt? Nuts not to, surely? Even this sort of issue aside, what happens when you want to add a feature and for whatever reason (that could include the original author's retirement or death!) hire someone else? Binary delivery seems like buying some cool-looking alien device that manufacturers widgets; you have no idea how it works or how to maintain it, so you just sell widgets hoping it keeps working without maintenance.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Imagine you're a company looking for software as a cloud service. Suppose the best software for the purpose only does 70% of what you want. So you contact the company who runs that cloud service and pay them to develop the additional features and specific business logic you need. Then you contract with them to manage private servers with your build on them. At no point have you seen or purchased source code - not even for the 30% new features that were written on your behalf. Those are entwined with, and only work as a result of, the other 70%. You're basically using a black box that's maintained by another company, and trusting in that company's competence and goodwill. That's essentially what the situation was here. If you sold your company and touted your special build of the software as a feature, and passed the contract along to the buyer, that would be fine. But if you misrepresented the situation and said you owned 100% of the code and were selling that along with the right to distribute it, that would be fraud. Of course, you could have gone the more expensive route and hired your own team of coders to write the whole thing from scratch, under whatever license you wanted, and then you would own the source. But if a company needs document software or meeting software in the cloud, how many pay to reinvent the wheel and roll their own?