jhell napisal(a): > > Simply put so its more understandable... There is no way for a company > or individual to be able to determine that the changes you have made to > unsaid software 1.1 were not due to knowledge that you have gained while > working for so said company and was paid for.
If there is no way to determine it, then you cannot assume up front that everything this person does should belong to the company. Why should a company have priority over a person, when there is doubt? Maybe that person is who should have priority in such situations? It's a quite philosophical question, who is more important - a human being or a business entity? My deepest personal belief is whenever there is an interest conflict between an individual and a company, the individual should be considered more important. Because companies are *for* people, not the other way. It looks like our "modern" world seems to do the reverse - to value businesses more than people, since the business has money. But money isn't everything, and contrary to the popular belief, it's not money that keeps the world running. It's people. Money wouldn't do anything just by itself. Money can't write code. Money can't manufacture computers. It's people who do it. They *use* money to do it, and usually do it for money, but the most important factor isn't the money; it's their work. And even if the person X actually uses the knowledge gained from company Y to improve another software Z (which is not made by company Y), it's nothing wrong with that, because it's almost certain that on a different occasion the same person X will use the same knowledge to improve software produced by company Y as well. Maybe even in the same way he/she did it with software Z. So the knowledge will not be lost from the company's point of view. On the other hand, there's no such thing like "knowledge gained from a company". All the knowledge a company has comes from the employees. They have brought the knowledge *into* the company. And often this knowledge comes from previous projects they were working on, before joining this company. So, if such knowledge transfer INTO the company is OK, what's wrong with similar transfer OUTSIDE the company? In Poland we call it "Kali's ethics". The name comes from a popular 19th century novel, in which one of the characters, called Kali, explained his moral rules: "If Kali steals a cow from someone, it's good; if someone steals a cow from Kali, it's bad". Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa [email protected] -- Zapraszam na moja strone: http://www.ap.krakow.pl/~raj/
