From the reports it is nowhere near proprietary systems, yet. Its a great development though and it shows what a single person can do for the community. We should shower this person with praise!
Amen! Thanks for chiming in. We need to remind ourselves, each other and those who dont undersrand yet: monopolistic or oligopolistic markets are not healthy for us.
“I am intending on open-sourcing the entire stack (PCB schematic/layout, all the HDL, Windows WDDM drivers, API runtime drivers, and Quake ported to use the API) at some point, but there are a number of legal issues,” Barrie wrote in a Hacker News post on Wednesday. Because he works in a tangentially related vocation, he wants to make sure none of this work would break his work contract or licensing etc.
Oh that sucks. There is a chance greater than 0 that he has signed some sort of non-compete that would prevent him from open sourcing his project. But let’s hope his company is like xerox was with the mouse and waves it off, effectively allowing him to continue.
IANAL, so I really do not know. But what I do know is that a lot of people do not have the resources to fight a company in court over it. I had an experience where I was unfairly terminated, and the lawyer I consulted with said I could take it to court, but it would most likely cost more than I’d receive. I’m sure that is a common sentiment in our (US) legal system as a whole.
Non-competes aren’t enforceable, but proprietary “work-for-hire” clauses might be. I think the difference is that a company can’t stop you from working for a competitor, but they can force you to sign away your rights to anything you create while employed there. I have worked for a couple of big-box consulting companies, and they have you list anything you created before joining them, so any new creations are automatically theirs.
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