1970 Visibility, Part 7 - the arbitration, Part 1

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Well, after the events of the previous posts, I'd about had it with that particular product area. I had achieved my goal - I had a lot of technical respect, people listened when I spoke up in meetings, but it looked like nobody was going to give me any credit for anything I did. Fooey on them.

I heard via the grapevine that there was a new group being put together in Poughkeepsie, reporting directly to Corporate in White Plains, and they were looking for people who were good at reviewing documents, and understood external interfaces. I contacted the manager of that group, and he requested my transfer.

What we were working on was highly confidential. We had an entire building to ourselves. No Company programmers or designers would be allowed in our office section of the building. If they had to come for any purpose, we received them in conference rooms in an unused part of the building. We ten had our own raised floor with any hardware we wanted. We had a kitchen. We had huge offices with windows! The external entries were double-locked, and there was an internal work area with more double locks, cameras, and motion detectors. Our manager was on loan from Corporate, and reported directly to a Director.

When I later left The Company, I was enjoined for ten years from even talking about what we had worked on, and if I wanted to apply for a job with any other company in the same business, competitor or not, I had to get the approval of The Company first, as part of the conditions of my retirement.

The ten years are up. I can talk about it. I can't imagine that it could possibly be of any concern at this point.

Imagine a black box with several holes that you can plug things into. Certain information goes into the box, and certain information comes out. If you know exactly what the input should look like, and what the output looks like, and what the box does, then you don't need to know what's inside the box to plug things into it. That's "plug compatible."

It's perfectly acceptable for a competitor to create a box, hardware or software, that does the same thing as your box. They can copy the inputs and outputs, the "plugs", also known as the externals. What they can't copy is what's inside the box, the internals.

A certain non-American competitor had developed a large mainframe very similar to (well, exactly like) ours. They wanted to build an operating system for it also very similar to (well, exactly like) ours, so that they could move customer applications off our hardware and onto theirs with the promise that everything would work exactly the same. "Plug compatible." And that's what they did, and they started shipping it to their customers.

Within weeks of the competitor's first ship, The Company service centers started getting strange calls for assistance. The callers were getting operating system error messages that said, essentially, "If you see this message, call [The Company] service center at [phone number]....", so, of course, they did. The weird thing was that they were not running our hardware or software. Hmmmm.

The halls of the White Plains legal department were filled with the clash of armor being buckled on, the rattle of swords against shields, and the neighs of 747 steeds champing at the bit.

In a distant country halfway around the world, heads were already rolling.

Sounds pretty cut and dried, eh?

Nope. First off, international copyright law, especially as pertains to computer software, wasn't very clear in the late '80s/early '90s. Also, what court had jurisdiction could affect the outcome.

Plus, the competitor had a defense that was difficult to counter.

Their argument was that our customer manuals document everything. We listed every control block down to the byte and bit level. We did not provide convenient exits for customers to add or change function - instead we allowed them to actually change internal code to branch out to their added function, including the ability to manipulate those internal control blocks. In a misguided attempt to satisfy everybody, we had opened the entire operating system to the customer. In a nutshell, since no one was able to determine where and how the customers were manipulating the internals, the internals had become externals, and therefore it was not only permissible to copy them, it was necessary in order to achieve plug compatibility.

They had copied pretty much the entire system. (Many programmers, when they're proud of something they wrote, put their names in the comments. A cursory glance at the competitor's source code, when it was provided during legal discovery, revealed names of The Company programmers. Either the programmers were moonlighting with a competitor, or....)

The parties decided to go to arbitration.

[Continued in #1971 Visibility, Part 7 - the arbitration, Part 2, coming soon to a blog near you.]
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