I2 Files Suit Against Palantir Technologies - Misappropriation Trade Secrets
i2group.com
i2group.com
For those not in the know, i2 is the maker of what's essentially the Microsoft word of this particular industry. They're the defacto standard.
i2 is also well known for being insanely hard to work with both with customers as well as by system integrators. Palantir has been vacuuming up a lot of their business recently and they're really starting to get kicked out of some traditional spaces they normally have a safe monopoly in.
One way that's being done is through interoperability with i2's products. Folks in the community have long wondered how that was done since i2 generally safeguards their file specifications pretty tightly and is very careful about who they license to. The assumption was that Palantir, with the huge resources at their disposal simply put a team on it to reverse engineer it.
This suit is largely about this if I understand correctly and the claim is that Palantir didn't reverse engineer it, but instead used an illegally licensed SDK, purchased through a shell company setup by a Palantir employee in order to trick i2 into licensing their SDK to a competitor when they had no intention of doing so.
Actually, the whole scheme sounds like a great corporate espionage demo for both company's products.
If it's true, it will not be very hard to prove.
As an aside, this stuff happens quite often. It's inappropriate and should never be condoned by anyone in an organization. I think people doing it often forget that these kind of actions can be considered illegal in some cases and jurisdictions, or at the very least a serious violation of licensing agreements.