HTML5: mixed signals

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2017-07-28 20:40, Richmond Mathewson via use-livecode wrote:
> Ooer . . . and how, pray tell, does one tease out what one learnt in
> one loaction from what one learnt in another?

I appreciate that in the realm of teaching (the example you gave) the 
area is a little grey.

However, in the area of computing then it really isn't that grey, and 
companies ensure that it is absolutely black-and-white by writing things 
into the contracts of their employees explicitly.

For example, the acceleratedRendering mode of the engine uses a very 
specific method of doing things - it conjoined several ideas together 
which did not (at the time) exist in any open-source product that I 
could find (if it had, I would have been able to probably use that and 
not have to write it myself!).

So, let's say one of my staff had (after seeing and reading the code) 
gone off and written their own version and tried to sell it. We would 
have had a good argument to say that they had stolen our IP. Indeed, 
that staff member would have had to prove that they had acquired the 
knowledge to replicate the functionality from somewhere else or could 
have replicated it without seeing our code. They probably would have 
found it EXCEPTIONALLY difficult to convince a court of this.

So, in generality what you are saying is perhaps not possible. However, 
in pretty much every (very) specific case it is.

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

P.S. I'm not saying this has happened, nor that there is anything 
particular special about acceleratedRendering mode. Just that it is a 
specific example of a small piece of well-defined IP we held (before 
going open-source) which made a good thought experiment.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps