[kragen]

Maybe, we don't have any idea how bad their legal position is. They might be considering themselves lucky to avoid prison, like Anthony Levandowski. 50 years ago doing what he did was normal; it was how Silicon Valley got built. Since then the laws have changed.

[elefanten]

Curious if you could supply any specific examples of that being normal in old SV? Of people taking a massive cache of proprietary work, including original research done by colleagues?

Genuine question.

[kevingadd]

Not precisely what you asked for but relevant to this topic of a game engine: A bunch of former NCSoft developers got sued (and lost) for heading off to their new game studio BlueHole with stolen Lineage 3 code and design material. This resulted in jail time.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/tera-developers-guilty-of-stea...

[kragen]

Basically the entire collection of papers of the Charles Babbage Institute consists of boxes of stuff people took home with them, including original research done by colleagues.

Also, as someone pointed out, Fairchild. And as they mysteriously failed to point out, Intel spawned from Fairchild the same way.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Fairchild semiconductor is one example.

[p_l]

At best the "traitorous eight" took with them the direction of research and work they wanted, which wasn't supported by Schockley - and Schockley did try to lockdown as much of the IP he could, taking patents out even if they were dubiously assigned to company.

[kragen]

Yes, my claim wasn't that investors approved of their employees leaving to compete with them; my claim was that, since then, the laws had changed in ways that gave them more power to prevent it, for example by vastly expanding the scope of trade-secret law. Levandowski wasn't accused of infringing any patents.

Given the expansive scope of papers donated to historical archives by various engineers from that period, it would be at least atypical if they only took the direction of research and work they wanted, rather than extensive knowhow and documentation of the processes they'd developed while working for Shockley (not "Schockley").

Nowadays the practices that made Silicon Valley possible are illegal in California but legal in China.

[kragen]

Just ran across https://www.righto.com/2020/10/how-bootstrap-load-made-histo...:

> The silicon-gate bootstrap capacitor exemplifies the paths of information between companies at the dawn of the microprocessor era. Practical silicon gate technology was created at Fairchild (with some earlier roots). When employees (including Faggin) left Fairchild for Intel, they took this knowledge with them. (And in some cases took "lots and lots of Fairchild internal confidential documents", see Shima oral history). From Intel, ideas spread to other companies, such as when Faggin leaving Intel to found Zilog, basing the Zilog Z80 on the Intel 8080.

The "Shima oral history" link is to http://landley.net/history/mirror/intel/shima.html, an interview from 01994 with Masatoshi Shima, an early Intel employee:

> Shima: When Zilog developed the Z80, it was quite successful because they knew the weak points of Intel, what Intel was not going to do. After Z80, they made one mistake. The original Zilog was founded by two guys, Federico Faggin and Robert Ungerman. Federico Faggin came from the semiconductors area. Ungerman came from the software and system area. Federico wanted to do the products related to semiconductors, but Ungerman wanted it related to his systems. The company did not have enough money for two businesses at the same time, and it didn't need two top managers, who fought with each other. Small companies are not able to hire good management. They should have brought more people from Intel, but they made an agreement with Intel not to. I think that was Zilog's biggest mistake. Originally Intel hired many, many people from Fairchild. They brought in lots and lots of Fairchild internal confidential documents. I had many such documents in my cabinet when I developed 4004. When Federico told Intel he would not hire people anymore, that meant he would not get the best people for the logic area.

> Aspray: But maybe it was necessary. Intel learned the mistake that Fairchild had made and had threatened suit against this new company. Maybe there wasn't any choice.