AT&T lawyer stopped Plan 9 release CD with songs by Lou Reed, Debbie Harry
tuhs.org
tuhs.org
1. sell a C++ compiler
2. call it C++
Their lawyer was very nice, and said sure. He also laughed and said he appreciated that I was the only one who bothered to ask.
The said no.
If I'm ever a super-villain, I'm using this as my origin story.
Later when they try to hold you to the original contract, you simply ask them for the contract you signed..
This has worked for me everytime :)
But even when notified of the changes, the other party is quite likely to accept reasonable changes when they have a fully signed copy, as it is more convenient than pushing back...
When they get the modified contract back that's their notification of your adjusted terms. Is it polite to ask them to print a modified contract? Yes. But it may not always be practical.
[This is not legal advice, duh]
Because employer/ employee is asymmetric (unless you're literally hired by an individual) my understanding is that it is good sense for them to prefer your amended contract if the terms you wanted are acceptable, because the law in many places says if you have a take-it-or-leave-it contract then the person in the "take it or leave it" position, here the employee, is entitled to interpret any ambiguous provisions in the most advantageous way. Having amended the contract, you are now on equal footing with the employer and any remaining ambiguity is resolved equitably which means less risk of nasty surprises for them.
My point is that you should not sneak in changes with the signature. If the contract is changed, you should notify the parties of the changes, not pretend you just signed their copy. If you do not notify them, it might be seen as an attempt to trick the other parties.
How that would play out depends on your local legal system, with options ranging from "too bad", "contract or clause invalidated or reverted", all the way to "prosecuted for fraud".
"Your should just have expected me to have changed the contract and compared it with the previous version to find all the changes!" is not an argument that would get court approval up here...
And then there is this:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/com...
All the rental property agreements use DocuSign and my signature looks perfectly legible.
Unlike my real signature :)
Many years ago I asked my employer why my salary was lower than the contractually agreed minimum salary for 21 year olds in their organisation. I never received a reply but I did receive a raise and pay backdated to the point where I was hired.
Years before that I asked my bank why I can't just use all the ATMs since they all have money in them and they're all connected to the same network. I never received a reply but some years later the ATMs were indeed all usable (of course, subsequently many began to charge money for withdrawals, so it's still worth going to the "right" ATM if you care)
More recently I asked my bank if they can avoid giving me a contactless capable credit card when they issue new cards. At first they said this was impossible, but when time came to renew my card and I mentioned being disappointed that it would now be contactless, the call taker said actually she can do that, she'll cancel the renewed card she's just had issued and send me one without contactless, but it will take a few days.
That card expired, and a few months ago I received its automatic replacement, this time it does have the contactless logo like all the others, but it came with a slim "Contactless-less" sheet explaining that the bank noticed I don't want a contactless card and have told this card not to allow contactless transactions despite the logo however, it is actually a contactless card and so if I change my mind I can just call the bank and activate the contactless feature.
[ You might wonder why I don't want a contactless card. Contactless credit cards can OK modestly sized payments based on proximity, which is convenient but clearly poses a risk of fraud I don't want. My phone is also capable of proximity based transactions, but it is not limited to some arbitrary size of transaction and I need to explicitly unlock it to allow the transaction. So, the phone "is" my credit card for the purposes of routine transactions, but it has better security. ]
I work in fintech, and have a lot of contact with UK developers who mention "the contactless limits are creeping up from GBP30 to GBP100". This in a country which is way more familiar with modern card tech. Meanwhile, my American bank, which probably gets 250 calls a day asking "why does my card have a Wi-Fi logo on it?" will seemingly let me unload my entire account with a tap.
This happened not because of you asking but simply because the banks figured out that they only need one ATM in a certain region for all of the banks.
Never mind the subsequent service level reduction.
See Ross Anderson's extensive material (sorry there's a lot of other stuff in here too) at Light Blue Touchpaper (a reference to Cambridge University's traditional colour and the instructions on fireworks):
I didn't have anything helpful to say. I've done side projects when I was working for Big Corps, but in every case notified management beforehand and got a written ok. Never had any trouble with it. When I've accepted job offers, I'd also provide a list of projects that were mine and had them sign off on it as a condition of employment. Never encountered any resistance to that, either.
But these poor people were sweating bullets imagining all the bad consequences of their employer finding out.
Just ask, in advance. If you're a valuable employee, they'll say ok. Never heard of one saying no. And they'll appreciate that you asked instead of sneaking around.
But be careful not to use company equipment.
Yahoo told me I couldn't participate in the Netflix recommendation challenge (not that I would have done well), and then 6 months later praised another Yahoo employee who did well in it. #notstillbitter
It sounds as you are their slave, and not an employee who works x hours per month for y amount of money.
Imagine a baker that has to ask the boss if he/she can bake a loaf of bread at home
See https://www.eater.com/2017/10/13/16459044/non-competes-chefs...
Also, let's be honest, how much harm can a 1 person project do to a multi billion corp? It's a fallacy.
Not at all. A salaried position comes with more open-ended expectations than an hourly position.
Besides, why the resistance to simply asking making it open and honest and the boundaries clear? My agreements on those things tended to be 2 or 3 sentences. I'd sign it, I'd get a veep to sign it, make a copy, and file it away.
It's just good business to do such things.
What an employee does in their own time is 0 business of the employer, none of the above is different from the others in kind.
As long as you agree that the child is a property of the company.
I'm not sure I agree at all that they'll say "ok" just because you're a valuable employee; I think you might have gotten lucky at your BigCorps.
But there are lots of other places to be.
Ethically speaking, I would think that as a principle, employees should never agree to ask the employer for permission to do things in their own time, for their own purposes, outside of the area of the business. Employees are just that, employees, not indentured servants. There are duties owed by employee to employer (and vice-versa) but this should not be one of them.
DOH!
> Just ask, in advance. If you're a valuable employee
That is a massive, massive if.
You might as well recommend fighting over your gym membership contract, of a bank contract, or a telecom operator contract. Right, it's your free choice, uh-huh. Either you accept it as is, or you go fuck yourself and workout at home, without internet, looking for a job where you'll be paid in cash (which also is far from being common). Again, unless you are preemptively perceived to be a very special customer (i.e. "expected to bring in a lot of money"), in which case your contract probably isn't typical to start with. And it is most likely your lawyer who negotiates over it for you anyway.
The only contracts you can't negotiate are government job contracts and union jobs. Which is one reason I'm not interested in either of those job categories.
> bank contract
Haha, I once negotiated a large loan from my bank at an interest a full percent below their official floor. I'm not even very good at negotiating, some people I know are much better.
> telecom contract
Have you ever said the magic words: "that sounds high, can I get this for a lower price?" The salesmen are allowed to negotiate. The initial price they quote you is the sucker price.
Every time I've been to the dealer for car work, all I have to do is balk at the quote and 10% comes right off.
This is not a special skill. Anybody can do it. Fer gosh's sake, you're expected to negotiate.
I haven't had success with trying to negotiate telecom contracts. When I balked at the price, the salesman would sometimes offer a contract with lower levels of services along with the price reduction. And typically, it's more costly per unit of service, so not much of a bargain.
For example my employment contract states (I'm paraphrasing), anything I do outside of work I own copyright on. And anything I do for work is owned by work.
In Germany for example you can’t give away the copyright on something you wrote as a person. The only thing you can waive is the distribution part of your copyrighted works.
What you do outside your work hours is only subject to the law, not an employee.
Forgiveness often makes sense at work, at least for software engineers, and for modest decisions. Do things the way you think is best instead of getting blocked for weeks looking for permission. If, later on, someone comes knocking and wanting to change it, fine, whatever.
However, taking the "forgiveness" route with more important / harder to change / expensive things - like building some addition to your house, building a software business separate your software job - is a recipe for disaster.
Edit: Comment is off-topic but I've heard this phrase so many times it's triggering.
You thought correctly. You should have read a book written by someone smarter. Imagine a world where you'd have to ask book writers if you're allowed to cite or to refer to their books in yours.
The web (and internet as a whole) was a very different playground to what it is now. In fact you only have to look at how trusting early internet protocols were and all the bolted on hacks we’ve needed since to see the change (eg SMTP, FTP etc all have security as an afterthought).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront
vs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Mars
Did you get into trouble because of the Zorland joke?
The Kaffe VM, for instance, is careful to show a disclaimer: technically, Kaffe is not Java. [0][1]
or
Hide and watch!
I'm sad to imagine the future we are headed towards where only new technologies are worked on, just to get the patents and sit on them, while everything pre-existing is deprecated and abandoned. Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish works eerily well.
Do you think we are headed in a better direction now? Or is it simply different?
I remember working with ATT in the late 90's when it was ATT broadband. They were still using green screen computer terminal windows for everything and were trying to get a GUI off the ground. Everything was alt and tab to switch windows etc, no mouse support! Into the mid 2000's! This was done by getting regular employees to try and cobble something together. The miraculous thing was that they pulled it off. Just took them a few years longer than it should have. ATT 'corporate' was known for being every bit the tv trope of a big business back then.
I remember seeing early builds and laughing it was so bad. ATT in particular was very much stuck in its ways as a corporation and was not inclined to change even the most broken of things.
When it finally rolled out it was such a mess. All the IT people could do was wince. Everyone but the people who mattered saw it coming. They hired some firm to re-do it all. That happened who knows how many times within just a few years after that. Went from refusing to update to doing it constantly and always breaking things.
I must say it was pretty insane watching $12k long distance bills from calls to, for instance India, get re-rated to several dollars.
Wondered how accurate the accounting could possibly be with so many inaccurate and fungible dollar amounts floating around.
Edit to add- years later I was working as an HVAC service technician and had to do some work at cell phone towers, server locations (wasn't really server farms back then), and phone agent locations for all cell phone carriers in Albuquerque, NM.
It felt surreal to see bow fast and far the companies had gotten in only a few short years. Companies (especially ATT) that couldn't figure out basic things about computers were at the cutting edge of like all the technology they used. ACs were top of the line Lieberts, they had all proprietary software on everything. The super remote cell phone towers had AC, power, storage, and communications redundancy. Their security had been beefed up to top tier. Contractors all needed top tier security clearance now.
I don't know if it was the Kevin Mitnick generation of phone phreaks, hackers, and social engineering, or the world in general, or a change in CEO but it was kind of like watching the titanic become some super-advanced space-faring time-warping ship.
That had kinda given me hope that- damn, maybe we can enter the new age jumping in with both feet. As a kid it felt like progress had been so slow!
I would have tried to negotiate a deal. If that failed, I would have abandoned making a C++ compiler.
Consider that at the time C++ and ObjectiveC were neck and neck, judging by the message volume on newnews. I rejected doing O-C because Stepstone demanded royalties for implementing it.
When Zortech C++ was released, an inexpensive native C++ compiler that was well-adapted to the 16 bit DOS model, C++ took off, and O-C sputtered and died. If AT&T had also demanded royalties, C++ would have been a failure, as cfront was not very practical.
90% of programming in those days was done on DOS, and Zortech C++ was top of the heap. If I may say so, Zortech C++ gave C++ the critical mass it needed to surge ahead.
My partner made the mistake of telling Eugene Wang of Borland how well ZTC++ was selling, and from the look on Eugene's face I knew we'd made a big mistake. Borland did an abrupt change in direction and went all in on Turbo C++. And the rest, as they say, is history. Microsoft also soon abandoned its object extensions to C and went with C++.
It came time to demo our work. Everyone else's code ran at least 5 times faster than mine. How could this be? Well, the Turbo C++ compiler was on the "immature" side at that time and produced really inefficient binaries. While the Borland Pascal compiler was mature and created code that ran really quite fast. Lesson learned. :)
We spent several months doing a technical comparison. And in the final meeting they went around the room getting opinions from everyone. All but one chose .NET (the dissenter was: "Whatever you think, boss"). The CTO said "That settles it. We're going with Java."[1]
So we spent hundreds of thousands on Oracle database licenses (because if you're changing languages, might as well change databases too, right?) and consultants to write a prototype. When they were done, it scaled to a grand total of two concurrent users on the fastest Compaq servers we had. While our existing VB code was serving about two hundred. Again, mature technology vs. immature technology.
I've been a big fan of C# since then. While I think the latest changes to the language and runtime are mostly eye candy (how hard is it to have a Main method, really?) there's some good stuff in there (I spent some time looking at System.Threading.Channels recently)
[0] The idea isn't bad, but what happens in practice is you get about 2 top-tier vendors and a bunch of also-rans.
[1] When choosing a technology stack, the CTO will pick what they want and everyone else's opinions are secondary. I think this must be a corollary to the "When a business moves, it's always closer to the CEO's house" rule.
As others said- thanks for sharing the insights, made my week.
It just doesn't have as popular libraries such as python/R etc given the latter are far easier to work with + lower barriers for entry.
Anyone have any info on what those abandoned Microsoft extensions were?
When I first got Pacific Bell (now part of AT&T) DSL in California in the early 2000s, it was run by a seperate division of the company, "Emerging Products Division". i always assumed that was because the traditional side of PacBell just didn't get digital at all and the leadership kept them apart to avoid the innovator's dilemma.
This technique had previously been used by IBM to the the PC out: they built a whole division from scratch in Boca Raton away from the IBM mother ship in NY
But by then the cat was out of the bag: IBM tried to achieve a proprietary beachhead with Micro Channel (and OS/2) but that added value for IBM, not the customer.
Maybe it was some kind of turning point. Also about that time did CEO age drop through the floor? They went from all being ancient to mostly 40 and under somewhere along the line.
Thanks for the book suggestion!
Was it necessary to ask? Unless C++ is patented and you live in a place where software patents are actually a thing, what could prevent you from writing your own implementation of something?
Besides, it was polite to ask.
A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they're doing their jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution."
The lawyer's supervisor is very rarely going to overrule him or her and say Yes. They will just say "it's their case, they're in charge." They defer to each other that way.
This probably seems excessively cynical to you. Indeed it doesn't always turn out this way. Sometimes rationality prevails.
But you're right: you have to prepare the ground very carefully when you ask for legal advice. If you just ask out of the blue "can we do this?" you're asking for trouble.
This. AND: There's seldom if ever much near-term personal upside for the lawyer, just downside if things go wrong --- and lawyers are a natural target for business people to point the fingers at if things do go wrong, because they're of different tribes.
Warren Buffett's longtime business partner Charlie Munger famously said, "Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. * * * Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives." [0]
That said, good business lawyers think of themselves as kinda being business people with legal training, assessing all the relevant risks and making recommendations for the business. (I tell my students: Try to think as though you were the CEO — but remember that you're not.)
Hence why the phrase "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" exists.
Often enough, only specific trade secrets get long-term protection.
Non-commissioned crewmen on board ships conducting classified missions, not themselves cleared, can usually say everything they did; it was the officers' responsibility to keep them from knowing any classified details.
Anything "disruptive" would be immediately shut down and threatened from the dominant industry. Anti-societal violence in video games were under constant protest (like the original Grand Theft Auto, or Mortal Kombat), and don't even think about trying to start a business like Uber or Spotify.
New file formats could be immediately crushed by IP concerns. Even web pages posting content about circumventing current systems or linking to sites like that were targeted. If you weren't a big player, you didn't have any way to accept money (besides asking people to mail you checks).
While tech is seen as too powerful now, I think it's at least nice that we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past. You don't have to worry about going to jail for programming crypto code, or be unable to find a hosting provider for your website that shows scraped public data.
_cough_ Patents _cough_.
YMMV based on the nature of issues your legal folks have to deal with on a regular basis. In our case, anything outside of standard contract review they had a reputation of being a nightmare to deal with.
If you ask them anyway, it might take a while to get a reply, because they'll be prioritising significant risks.
You are also making the faulty assumption that policy has sufficient coverage to avoid ambiguities and cover all events. It doesn't. Something not particularly risky, not covered by policy, but touching on a legal matter are not uncommon.
Your comment is rather strange in fact given the actual linked article's example.
Oh also Fraunhofer uploaded the mp3 source to the ISO website for years with no license, let the community build on it for years (I feel like they knew) and then asked everyone for a minimum of 10K USD.
I cannot remember all of them now, but there was a few like that.
If you tossed this idea up to that level, you’d piss the officer off for wasting his time and burn the relationship with the lawyer.
Also, this team was pretty infamous at that point for not playing nice with the corporate structure (eg naming the OS Plan 9). Sure, they were rockstars to nerds, but Unix, etc. never made Bell/AT&T real money. Wasn’t their fault, but they never got internal clout and were just a small, weird group in a giant company.
What I've found is exactly what you describe: if I come to legal asking for a "no" – which I've done more than a handful of times – that's an easy answer that comes out of an email. But when I come wanting their approval, if I can get past the first meeting with counsel the next one is with officers, you are pitching the benefits while the lawyers are talking about risks, and if you can convince everyone to take the risks you get what you want. Just be sure to write down meeting minutes and send them around; no one at that level was taking notes ;)
"We want to distribute a ton of IP with unclear/insufficient releases" has almost no benefit and a mountain of risk for any company. It's no wonder the lawyers said no.
Remember Plan9 was not going to make money enough for any executive to care.
I have no idea what they are talking about, what Plan 9 is, what is being distributed, why is AT&T involved, etc. Read the whole first post, still have no clue.
TUHS is The Unix Heritage Society mailing list, which might offer you some cues as to context. There's a link at the top-right of the submitted link:
https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/
Rob Pike is Kind of A Big Deal in Unix, C (he's the Pike in Kernighan and Pike, a/k/a The UNIX Programming Environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme...)) The Go programming language, and a thing called Plan 9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
Plan 9 From Outer Space was a so utterly bad it's ... well, just bad ... 1957 science fiction film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
Plan 9 from Bell Labs appropriated the name from the film for an operating system building on Pike's (and others') earlier experience developing Unix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
You can download and install Plan 9 OS if you like: https://plan9.io/plan9/
Ten Thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/
The sibling comment gave a good answer.
But don't take their word (or Wikipedia's, for that matter) for it.
Go ahead and install[0] it yourself.
I'd recommend a VM.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA/vid...
I dunno, maybe the technical problem from the beginning was distribution and installs and not actually compression. Maybe lawyers suck, but maybe Plan 9 was actually more for entertainment than anything else.
Wonderfully, spectacularly, bad.
Having experienced him, he's kindof an asshole. Smart, but with the tact un an unpleasant rash.