Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!oberon!cit-vax!ucla-cs!rutgers!iuvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucdcsp!gillies
From: gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Credit where credit is due (was
Message-ID: <76000160@uiucdcsp>
Date: 21 Mar 88 16:17:00 GMT
References: <752@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Lines: 24
Nf-ID: #R:cresswell.quintus.UUCP:752:uiucdcsp:76000160:000:1115
Nf-From: uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Mar 21 10:17:00 1988


A Xerox Employee is required not to disseminate "Xerox Private Data"
for two years after leaving Xerox.  People say it is o.k. to hire
Xerox employees to take advantages of their ideas.  These people are
just plain wrong.  These employees can be sued by Xerox for releasing
trade secrets (such as the architecture of Star/Bravo/etc).

The plain truth is that Xerox is too disorganized to sue most of its
employees who do this.

One case in point:  Several Xerox researchers left the company to form
Adobe.  They had already designed the interpress page-description
language, which Xerox kept as a trade secret for many years.

These employees were forced to entirely redesign interpress
("PostScript") and reimplement it in a different way.  Luckily, page
description languages were already invented, and  it was not too hard
to come up with one that was substantially different from Xerox's.

Another employee who left two years ago could not join {Apple, Adobe,
Imagen, ...} because he would probably be sued.  He joined NeXt.

Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
            {gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu}