Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

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A surprising number of companies do include “you may not use the service we provide you to compete with us” in their terms of service.

(edit)

After a quick search the best example is Atlassian. It would (apparently, IANAL) break terms to plan a JIRA competitor using JIRA.

  > Customer must not (and must not permit anyone else to): [...] (d) use the Products to develop a similar or competing product or service

https://www.atlassian.com/legal/atlassian-customer-agreement

Also Salesforce. Their competitors are explicitly disallowed from using any of their services for any reason.

  > SFDC’s direct competitors are prohibited from accessing the Services, except with SFDC’s prior written consent.

https://www.salesforce.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/...

I remember working for a company that did a lot of business in logistics. We were strictly prohibited from using any Amazon Web Services because several of our very high profile customers didn’t want anything on AWS. The higher ups were thoroughly convinced Amazon would copy it (and I mean, they came out with a product that competed with us, so they weren’t wrong!)

This kind of stuff “but they’ll copy us” is always weird (and wrong). Logistics isn’t some secret sauce. It’s taught in operations degrees across colleges. If a company is worried that all it takes is another company “copying” their IP to supersede them, then you don’t have a company, you have a simple app.

Amazon didn’t “copy” logistics from Apple. But both of them use similar underlying processes and optimizations. They both excel at it, and neither is eating the other’s profits. The same goes for smaller companies. Or the logistics providers like UPS.

Perhaps provide an example or two?

Was the parent comment edited, because it does have a couple of examples in it

Yes, I edited after about 20 minutes to add examples, mea culpa. Will mark the edit.

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