3 ms·
It's very common for places to claim ownership of all code you write as an employee, both in and out of work. I don't know whether this would stand up in court,
by to3m 12y ago
It's very common for places to claim ownership of all code you write as an employee, both in and out of work. I don't know whether this would stand up in court, but nobody I've spoken to has tried to find out.
As for the provenance of the code, it's quite probable it was a clean-room reimplementation. Writing such tools isn't exactly rocket science. I wrote a PDB-oriented addr2line for VC++ a few years ago, and it didn't have any of the original addr2line code in it at all. In fact, I've never even looked at the addr2line code. I just ran addr2line --help and copied the command line options I saw there. I suspect a reimplementation of strings would be just as straightforward.
- kabdib 12y agoYes, it was clean-room, along the lines of "I need a program to extract strings from binary files." I don't think I even looked at a man page for an existing implementation, so the options and functionality are almost certainly different from other implementations of strings. This was driven by Microsoft's hostile policies towards running anything open source inside the company (you have to get special dispensation to install Linux, for instance). Actually looking at outside source code is a big no-no. There has been at least one case of a contractor including GPL3 code in a project, and MS responded by (a) letting the contractor go, and (b) releasing the source for the product in question. [And no, it wasn't Windows]