Abusive contracts

[Jerry Feldman]

I've seem some lousy contracts and some good ones. The non-competes can
be nasty. Most of the contracts I had (while with DEC) were restricted
to the cost center at DEC. But a friend of mine working for an agency in
Natick was working at State Street Bank in Quincy. At the end of the
contract, they did not have any work for him, so he was able to get
another contract in a separate group at SSB, was sued by the agency, and
he went to court and prevailed. The NDA may be mandated by the client.
I've had contracts where the agency had their standard NDA, and others
where I had to sign a client NDA. I generally keep my confidentiality
pretty close to the vest. Since most of my work has been in the
Unix/Linux space there were a number of things that gave DEC a
competitive advantage, One that I can talk about is the UTMP/UTMPX
libraries. The Unix 98 standard mandated using struct timeval ut_tv
where we had previously used time_t. This added an additional integer.
HP's solution was to maintain 2 different libraries and 2 different utmp
files, /etc/utmp and /etc/utmpx. For compatibility we needed to provide
both the older utmp as well as the utmpx interfaces. We found that we
could hide the usec field inside the user field so if the utmpx library
was used we could provide the proper information. It was a slight
competitive advantage since it made the utmp and utmpx libraries a bit
faster. Everyone was able to solve the problem in later releases, so
this trick was only an interrim. I'm sure that any code I wrote over the
years of my contracting would have no real value to a competitor today
(especially since Compaq killed Tru64 Unix - before the HP merger).

I've also found that the short contracts are the suckiest. I had 1
contract at Demoulas where one aspect of my job was to clean up the
language in comments. They had bought code from a third party vendor,
and just about every module had at least 1 f**k or sh***t.


On 03/10/2011 11:18 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> Has anyone noticed that contracts are becoming really mean spirited=20
> lately? I mean, seriously, some of the ones that I've looked at are jus=
t=20
> ridiculous.
>
> How's this clause:
>
> " The Consultant acknowledges and agrees that any such breach or=20
> threatened breach will cause irreparable injury to the Company and that=
=20
> money damages will not provide an adequate remedy to the Company."
>
> I mean, jeez, in civil law, money damages ARE the remedy!
>
> That on top of 5 years confidentiality, 2 years non-compete, all for a =

> few hours part time work? A 6 page NDA and at a low rate because they=20
> are on a shoe string budget?  Are you kidding me? I know a word and a=20
> handshake is old fashioned, but why does every dime store lawyer feel=20
> the need to write these faustian contracts? Especially when there is so=
=20
> little gain?
>
> Just my little Charlie Sheen for day. The software industry in the last=
=20
> few years has become really awful.
>


--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846



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