Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Comment: Even governments that can threaten long prison term can't keep their employees from blabbing to the press. How can anyone expect a corporation, that has neither a prison system not the ability to subpoena reporter's notebooks, to effectively muzzle employees' freedom of speech?
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As a regular Cringely reader, I don't recall any of the Cringely writers publishing any proprietary information about ongoing negotiations. IDG has standards and they depended on ads from those very companies. Dvorak had better sources and actually named names but the closest he ever got was talking in general terms about Scott MacNeally's silly WABI crusade. (He met with Gates to get Office ported to Solaris and Gates agreed if SUN guaranteed a minimum number of sales. Which, embarrassingly, was larger than the total number of SUN workstations sold in a year or more.)
As for government leaks, the vast majority of those are intentional and sanctioned. It's part of the DC negotiation toolkit. Of the few that aren't, attempts have been made to put leakers in jail. Some successful. When they fail it is because the information is usually available to hundreds or thousands of drones. Serious leaks have almost always been tracked down and sent to jail (the most recent being Bradley Manning).
In the tech world, people *have* been sued for NDA violations.
Here's a recent one:
http://www.bizjournals.com/prnewswir.../06/07/NY20460
NDAs are a lot like copyrights and trademarks pooh-poohed by many but an inescapable part of the tech world.