[nvarsj]

The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.

Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.

[awakeasleep]

what do you mean by "exact same thing"

This isn't about "poaching" employees (in our society people can work where they choose, they are not property of a feudal lord) and using their knowledge.

This is about ex-employees accessing Apple's internal fileshares. It's about instructing employees who were about to leave to take everything they could with them, and giving them training on how to evade Apple's offboarding security process.

[nvarsj]

Well I don't know the details from Apple's side, and this was 20 years ago. That was just the discussion on the ground. I personally experienced a senior Mot employee grilling me about some IP I had developed, then go to Apple the next week. Also saw many directors/VPs with extensive proprietary knowledge go to Apple. Apple opened up recruiting events 10 minutes down the street from Mot HQ in Schaumburg Hilton to poach the best people (which I went to, and flew to Cupertino to interview for the original iPhone ios team - wish I had passed that, I would be retired by now!). I know there was also a free flow of information as part of the ROKR collab while Apple was working secretly on the iPhone.

[stefan_]

Of course, this is essentially the basis of capitalism. Corporations are just people, folks, spread the knowledge and we all get richer.

The best corporations I worked at had people dedicated to reverse engineering competitor products and were deeply steeped in the market, the worst were those where product just cared about making their bosses happy.

[plun9]

Reverse engineering is not the same as this.

[Andrex]

It isn't, but it is also still (mostly) illegal too.

[plun9]

It shouldn't be illegal.