Hey Chris, good to know for any consulting companies (like the OP's) that okcupid/IAC might want to hire! It's nice that you're not so concerned about trade secrets!
> Hey Chris, good to know for any consulting companies
> (like the OP's) that okcupid/IAC might want to hire!
> It's nice that you're not so concerned about trade secrets!
Snideness is unbecoming.
A more straightforward way to write your comment would be "Since you believe that the OP did not divulge trade secrets and are opposed to apparently frivolous legal action, you must not care about protecting your own trade secrets."
The problems with this position should be obvious.
Thanks! Actually, I'm happy to address this comment now that it got your positive rephrasing. But first I should add I no longer work at OkCupid, and even if I did, the company is far bigger than one person's opinion. What I'm stating on HN is my personal opinion, not OkC's.
Ok, I personally find this kind of lawsuit deplorable for 2 reasons:
(1) The world is better when people share ideas and don't try to claim ownership over them. If, while I worked at OkCupid, someone left my company and used "secrets" we held to start or improve a competitor, I would believe it was their right. And that I had failed to nurture their creativity or compensate them well enough.
(2) This is an individual being assaulted at a corporate magnitude.
How about a contractor selling the okc source code tree to some Chinese "entrepreneur" who launches a copycat site in China that somehow gains 300M members within a year?
Just one extreme to make your statement look silly.
If you have an idea and keep it secret, it is protected from some reverse engineering or industrial espionage as a trade secret.
Unlike a patent, if you competitor invents it independently, then it is no longer a trade secret. You are only protected against a restricted range of dodgy dealing, and then only if you took adequate security measures (employees under appropriate NDA, not obvious in your product, obfuscated if sourcecode, that sort of thing).
Some people say they are 'software patents done right'. Certainly they serve a different purpose.
It's also puts a bit more depth on Elon Musk's comments about not patenting technology developed within SpaceX[1], since the perceived patent infringers would laugh at any lawsuit and use the patents as a recipe (China, pseudo-state run companies therein, etc). They may not be patenting technology, but I bet there's quite a bit protected anyways as a trade secret.
Given the biggest "trade secret" on OkCupid is the matching algorithm and its laid out so that anyone who wanted to would be able to implement it, I bet he would be pretty excited to hear that 300M people in China found his idea awesome.
Also it would probably be faster to write a copy from scratch in rails than figure out the various dependencies for OKWS and SFSLite (unless that's really improved since I was there). :)
Or for that matter, concept ideas to implementation details. I for one would consider a case different if a past coca cola employee would start his own suger flavored drink, vs copying the cola recipe.
That's not a trade secret. A trade secret would be for instance if the Google co-founders did not patent PageRank and kept secret the way the ranked search results in Google.
A more straightforward way to write your comment would be "Since you believe that the OP did not divulge trade secrets and are opposed to apparently frivolous legal action, you must not care about protecting your own trade secrets."
The problems with this position should be obvious.