Quote:
Originally Posted by kindlekitten
I am certain that there is a fair amount of corporate espionage and employee hijacking that goes on to cover many of those knowledge bases
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If it was as common as some people think, we'd see more lawsuits over it (a lot of states let companies use anti-compete/poach clauses in their employee contracts).
And it isn't about knowledge per se, it is about writing the code. You can't just hire a guy and say "regurgitate the book worth of text you wrote for this other company and hit the build button". Even if they could do it, it is copyright infringement. At the cost of the lawsuit, they could simply hire 3 guys and do it 'clean room' instead and get it done faster. And then on top of that, ignoring copyright infringement/etc, the firmware for each device is slightly different and just copying code around leads to bugs that need to be investigated, fixed, and so on. That's ignoring the huge differences between an Android device, a standard Linux device, Windows CE devices (in about 3 dozen flavors), and so on. Half the time the code can't even just be copied, you have to write it from scratch anyways.
The knowledge on how to read eReader, Mobi, ePub, etc is there and shared... you don't need to poach anyone into your team to make that stuff happen. Specifications are a wonderful thing in the software industry for that very reason, and the great software devs out there can sometimes make do without that and just poke around the data long enough to figure it out. That won't write code for you, nor have any guarantee that the end result will be bug-free. I've been in the industry long enough to know the realities of software development, even when we know exactly what we are 'building' with our code.
EDIT: As a side comment, I don't really think the FCC has any hand in the delays anymore... what I discovered there is posted in the other thread.