Slashdot Log In
Adam Hinkley's IP Hindsights
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Apr 09, 2001 12:12 PM
from the twenty-twenty- dept.
from the twenty-twenty- dept.
spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Adam Hinkley started out as a bright 17-year-old Australian software hack with a good idea. Now he's 22, broke, and has lost all his intellectual property after being crushed by the multinational software company that first took him into its folds and then dragged him through the courts in an at-times bitter and protracted battle. He has a few words of warning for any other young mind thinking of starting off down the same path." Sobering, but it looks like Adam has been able to shrug off the ruling with admirable ease. Learn from what he says.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
What is said does count! (Score:2)
have a solution.
Some years ago I was working for a company that would ask you to work 12 hours but only report 8.
"It was for the company." They would have you work 12 hour shifts and from time to time give you a call
and say "We can not get any one to relieve you. Do you mind working the next shift?" say no and you are out, accept
and keep your job.
I began carrying a micro cassette recorder on me with a tie pin mike from radio shack. I would set it to voice activate
and record any conversation with my employer. When I did loose the job they gave me all my pay and a nice
severance package. I began carrying it to interviews. It really came in handy when I would interview, get the job, note
something was not in the contract and play the promise of the HR person. Needless to say it became a great tool. It
seems that here a recording is a verbal contract and very binding!
One word. (Score:2)
Blackmail. Work at any corporation and you will immediately find out that they do something terribly illegal. In fact, if you're in IT, you're definitely going to find out. You manage their information. You see everything. You know all. When the time comes you can truly make them pay.
Of course, plenty of companies are 100% law biding, but chances are if they'd ever want to sue you when they first considered you a friend, they'd have just the right kind of greedy mentality to do plenty of illegal stuff.
Re:So this is why Hotline started sucking... (Score:2)
As far as I understand it, there are two components to a Hotline system. Two different software programs. They even go so far as to call one the "Hotline client," and then they call the other the "Hotline server." Does this not sound more like... dare I say it, in this we're-way-past-all-that 21st Century... the Client-Server model??
It seems to me that the only reason they refer to Hotline as a peer-to-peer app is that peer-to-peer gets a lot of snazzy media attention these days, and since Hotline is now owned by some kind of corporation, they like that sort of thing. That, and it seemed like the upcoming Hotline2 was going to more resemble a true peer-to-peer app.
I'm actually surprised Microsoft hasn't started calling itself the "world leader in peer-to-peer file sharing," or something of the kind. Cuz after all, peer-to-peer is built right in to every Windows box.
--
Re:+2 cents (Score:2)
It's sad what happened in Adam Hinkleys life; however when it's all said & done he's responsible for his own decisions. To date he's refused any & all of that responsibility and indeed seems incapable of recognizing cause & effect, ownership & obligation.
It's all about Adam, all about what he wants, all about how he believes things should be run, never anything about anyone else.
Frankly while he may be a good coder he seems a tremendously (almost scarily) immature person and certainly not someone I can ever imagine wanting to be involved with professionally. Indeed I expect he has little to fear from investors & other such folks, he's clearly poison.
Re:+2 cents (Score:2)
However we only have Adam Hinkley's word that HE was under these conditions.
I'm asked to believe this bright young man, 17 years old, with a family & lawyers & the skills to found a company is now unable to speak in his own defense.
At no point does he express concerns, speak to his father (who was closely involved in the business,) raise issues with his lawyers. He was online every night speaking with his pals, many of whom had been involved in Hotline themselves & were passioniate supporters yet he doesn't run reality-checks past them, express his concerns, ask for advice or assistance.
Instead he signs a set of contracts *very* advantagous to him and we don't hear anything negative until he wants to set terms.
It all sounds very self-serving to me.
It could be true but neither you nor I actually know. Clearly he wasn't able to convince authorities in Canada (where they're very concerned about this sort of thing) nor Australia (I have no idea - I live in Canada & the US, not Australia.)
You are so sure he's the victim & everyone else was a crook & a swindler. From what I've seen Adam Hinkley has presented no compelling evidence of this, just his childish accusations & the sycophantic repeating by his fans.
To me it looks the opposite - a young man who got greedy & attempted to walk off with stolen goods, twice.
I could be completely off-base. Indeed I openly acknowledge I likely am in many ways. However yours & others repeating how Adam Hinkley was screwed doesn't make it so & until something more substantive is presented your assertions don't mean much, however passionately repeated.
In the meantime it looks like it is all-moot - the legal systems of two countries have investigated & made their determinations: Adam Hinkley is responsible for the contracts he signed & thus was found in fault.
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:2)
Indeed, I need several *billion* dollars.
Because, dammit, I need to give it away. I think I could do a bang-up job of helping a *lot* of people if I had a lot of money.
(Sure, I can help even without the money -- but the money would mean I could do so much more!)
--
Re:Insightful, but impractical (Score:2)
If you're writing software purely for the love of doing so, just release it anonymously as public domain... in later years, after getting a better contract or deciding to strike out on your own, you can just pretend to discover it on the internet and use it in GPL/BSD/proprietary software with your name on it.
Re:Shruging off my ass (Score:2)
Wow, this sounds exactly like me about two years ago ... oh, right, right before I got screwed over by the nice employer I was working for "on the side" as I finished college.
Not to sound too bitter or paranoid, but the bottom line is that unless you have it in writing, odds are they will try to screw you over. And even if the people you trust don't screw you over, what happens if the company changes hands or hires new management? The new owners have no obligations to you that aren't in writing, and the old owners can (and probably will) take a very hands-off approach to your problems.
I loved my workplace, I was working with friends who trusted the company, too, etc, etc. I left for 8 weeks to write my thesis, and everyone at the company knew this and told me (but didn't write down and sign anything) it was ok; when I got back I found that I had all but lost my job (they were about a week away from firing me), had lost my stock options -- which were verbal agreement only -- and got paid $500 to finish my project, basically as a going away payoff.
Side note: a family member who is an accountant said the $500 was suspicious; for amounts $600 or higher (at least in my state) the employer has various obligations to the contractor. Less than that, it's just money thrown to the wind, essentially.
Bottom line: I was naive and stupid enough not to get it in writing, and got screwed over. When money is involved (especially now that the dot-com economy is going through a harsh Darwinian stage) you're just another number in the end. Are you 100% sure that your bottom line is that important to the employer?
-jdm
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:2)
Lisa introduced him to recycling things to get change. Before long, he'd opened up a recycling plant and was again the richest man in town. Of course, he also turned sinister and devised a contraption to "sweep the sea clean" by catching fish in a huge net of six pack rings.
--
Re:So this is why Hotline started sucking... (Score:2)
If Hotline isn't "peer to peer", then nothing is, including Napster and 'Doze's file sharing.
P2P isn't the opposite of client-server. It's more about dynamic servers that come and go, such that no static database can keep track of them.
---
Re:We need a unified front (Score:2)
Isn't that the whole point? Weed out the bad employers. If they aren't open to negotiation, then they're not people.
---
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:2)
If you need any help for spending a few billions on *good* things, send me a mail!
/max
I'm a little confused. (Score:2)
He wrote Hotline, he worked for HCL, who he assigned all rights of hotline to, and then he left the company.....
and now he has no rights to Hotline, but the company does...
Re:We need a unified front (Score:2)
Take as one example (not to takes sides on this, but just to point out the kinds of things that would certainly happen in our industry), the 60 minutes story of one doctor who was removed from medical practice by the AMA....
His patients were the sort who suffered chronic, debilitating pain the likes of which you and I are not likely to be able to empathize with. He found that perscribing large doses of narcotics (e.g. opiates and the like) helped these people live normal lives, and according to his results and all of the research available, such patients were seemingly immune to the addictive properties that the recreational users of these drugs were subject to. Apparently, the feedback loop that causes addiction is somehow interfered with by the using the drugs to relieve chronic pain. Who knew.
Instead of holding this man on a pedistal for finding a way to let his patients live relatively normal lives, the doctor had his license revoked and at least one of his patients, unable to face the debilitating pain again, killed themselves.
No, paperwork standardization is one thing, but I don't want or need ethical oversight.
Re:We need a unified front (Score:2)
Unions have a whole lot of baggage that I don't think this industry needs. A stripped-down sort of union might be nice. The problem is, I don't want to be constrained to do business the way everyone else does, I just want to get some paperwork standardized so that companies don't get spooked every time I hand back their IP agreements with loads of red-marker.
If you want to call the organization that produces that document a union, fine, but I have no interest in standardized pay scales; time off; benefits; etc, because I'm in a position trade on my skillset for what I want. I'd have to step down in all of those areas in order to get standardization across the industry. Clearly not a win.
Re:We need a unified front (Score:2)
Re:The Hotline Saga, revised (Score:2)
Re:+2 cents (Score:2)
were you underage? were you forced to work long hours in isolated circumstances? were you separated from everybody you knew? were you pressured by your bosses? were you made promises? were you duped adn swindled? If so then yes you could take some leagal action (only if you are rich though in America only the rich win in court).
Paul Hinkly (Score:2)
Defense of IP? (Score:2)
No matter, I think that this kid made the same mistake that most large corporations make w.r.t. IP. He assumed that he could own an idea, and at the same time tell someone about it. The fact is that you get to do one or the other. Once an idea is shared, you can't ever take it back. In fact, the benefactor of this sharing can't give it back no matter how hard he tries.
I think that if Adam Hinkley really wanted to keep the code that he worked on, while employed by someone else, he should have released it under GPL. But because he tried to keep ownership of it w/out the resources to defend that ownership, he lost it completely.
Re:We need a unified front (Score:2)
This may be changing given the recent economic situation, but last I heard there were still more tech jobs open than qualified people to fill them. As a prospective employee, you do have leverage; just as the company can tell you to go away, you can seek employment at another company with more reasonable policies. Adopting the attitude that you have no negotiating power is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
TIme metaphors (Score:2)
That accurately describes the standard Western European time metaphor. The model that we use is that we're standing on a time line, walking forward as time elapses. That's why we say "it was a long way ahead" referring to a span of time, or we are "forward looking" if we think about the future and "backward looking" if we think about the past, and it's why we "face the future".
If you think about it, the time metaphor that we use doesn't make sense. You can't see into the future, but you can see into the past. That's why some cultures (from memory, and I could be wrong about this, Chinese and some Australian Aboriginal cultures do this) have as their metaphor that you're walking along a time line backwards. Presumably in their buzzword-laden corporate cultures, if they have them, someone who looks to the future is "backward-looking". :-)
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:2)
What a nasty unpleasant and largely untrue saying that is.
And what an unthinking reaction that is. One only has to look at the large number of lottery winners who end up deeply in debt after the money is gone, and the large number of entrepreneurs who bounce back after losing everything, to know that the saying is, in fact, quite true. Whether it's unpleasant and nasty might depend on whether you're a poor man who thinks getting a million dollars is going to make him rich.
--
Re:We need a unified front (Score:2)
_____________
I want that judge! (Score:2)
Wow! Amazing! A judge that considers intent, not just the hard line of the law. We see that even though Adam did violate the terms of employment, he had no intent to cause harm to the plaintiff, and probably minimal harm was done.
This case is not unlike the kid who brings a tin of Altoids to school and gets kicked out under the drugs "zero tolerance" (read: zero common sense) policy for having something that looks like the real thing.
Or, like the time I got pulled over for speeding, the state cop told me "you weren't doing anything dangerous, you were just breaking the law." Granted, I deserved the ticket and had no grounds to object, but it still burns me that he said that .
--Jon
Releasing software under GPL you may not own (Score:2)
Re:To summarize on employment (Score:2)
---
Re:More Info... (Score:2)
---
Re:More Info... (Score:2)
---
Re:In Defense of Hotline (Score:2)
And the false promises that Roks and others made to Hinkley, LONG before your time at HLC, are quite relevant to this.
Ok, I have to get in one little dig - I hope you're looking for a new job, because it doesn't look like HLC has much of a business model these days!
Job Advice (Score:2)
In Defense of Hotline (Score:2)
I am very familiar with all of the issues in the case. I have met all the main players, except Adam Hinkley himself.
I find it hard to believe the bullshit that I have seen in these comments. Many of the "facts" cited here are entirely made up. For example, Hotline was ruined by the PC port. Most of the work on the pc port was done by Adam Hinkley himself. He did not leave because he was opposed to banner ads, or because he disagreed with the way the company was going, or because greedy investors threw him out, or even because he was homesick. The death of his sister, tragic though that may have been, was entirely irrelevant. He left, and took the source with him, because he wanted a better deal. He did not feel that anyone else should own any more of "his" product. Even if they were investing money in its development. He wanted complete control, in perpituity.
Keep this in mind. When he left, he was the President of the company and its majority shareholder. He had a seat on the board and a veto over any change in ownership structure. Nobody had the power to take anything away from Adam. He WAS the company.
Read the judgement. It confirms what I have always thought. Adam Hinkley screwed everyone he ever had a chance to screw. Including his own father.
Greed was indeed the problem here. But it was Adam Hinkley's greed, not that of his business partners' that was the real issue. Sorry, but if you want corporate bullys, you will have to look somewhere else.
Re:IP Assignment contracts (Score:2)
Quite right. I've just got my company to sign a waiver for a project I'm about to start coding for. They did remind me about a clause in my contract that says that I must not have any outside interests that interfere with the efficient running of the company, but that does at least make both our positions clear.
If you're thinking of writing some code outside of company hours, then ask for a waiver. Resist the temptation to code when you don't have one, especially if you've asked for a waiver and they've refused. They're almost certain to demand the IP later, especially if it's beginning to get somewhere.
Re:One word. (Score:3)
Of course, the political party in question was not the one most of the employees voted for, so he blew the whistle on the unionized employees who, got pretty pissed-off at it. To make a story short, the company owner's got his Mecedes torched, his office was smeared with grease and other gooey disgusting stuff, his lawn sprinkled with pesticides and fertilizer at different places, and plenty of the employees who "gave" to the political party went to the political party to demand their money back, and my friend provided information about all this to the Elections Supervisor office, who promptly laid charges against the company and the political party (the candidate was later convincted of election fraud for paying people to vote several times for him).
The company, each director, the political party and the candidate were each fined six times the amount of the "contributions", it's directors and the candidate deprived of civic rights for 10 years (they can't vote and can't present themselves as candidates to elections),
Better yet, the insurance company didn't pay a cent for the torched Mecedes, as it was able to allege that the owner deliberately torched it himself to commit insurance fraud (the owner didn't bother fighting this as he was entangled with the bigger legal problems with the Elections Supervisor), and when my friend was fired for blowing the whistle, he successfully went to court and was reinstated with indexed back pay (the case took two years). And the company had to keep his replacement, too.
So, as you can see, in a Socialist country, democracy cannot be corrupted easily, and the workers cannot be screwed either.
(there. Score: 5: flamebait+3, troll+2)
--
A few words of advice (Score:3)
Now I may sound like an old fart - which I guess I am at 30 - but from you comments it seems that most of you have a lot to learn about business in general and software publishing in particular.
I see a lot of misconceptions here, so let's start with the biggest one right away:
It seems that most of the people commenting on the story think that the "idea" is the main thing in getting a software company up and running. Not so! As a rule of thumb, the idea is 5% of the program. The program is 5% of the product. The product is 5% of the company. In other words: While it's certaintly true that without the idea there would be no company, it's AT LEAST as true to say that without a lot of (non-idea and programming related) work there would be no company either.
Coders tend to underestimate the importance of the supporting organization and the networking involved in getting a product to the shelves, not to mention selling it once it's in the stores. It's true that a lot of barriers have fallen in this area over the last years, but the main part of the job is still to get the software ready for the market, and actually getting it TO the market. In other words you (OK, we) tend to overestimate the value of ideas.
In the area of ideas: You do NOT need a brilliant idea (although it won't hurt). You need a good idea and a good plan. Without a plan you'll get exactly nowhere. Have you thought about distribution? PR? User segments? Competition? You NEED to think about those things, in order to find a way to package your IP in a product that will actually stand a chance of making money.
The last major misconception is in the area of the nature of business deals. It seems that a lot of people are outraged that he got "screwed over". Well guess what: People do not do business in order to be nice to eachother! They are out there to make money, and if you do not make sure that your ass is covered, the easiest way to make money will be to "screw you over". That would be your fault for not getting a good lawyer to check out the contract before you signed it, and not their fault for being evil capitalists. If you don't want to deal with capitalists, don't invite them in. If you don't want to deal with them, and your product needs financing to take off, your plan wasn't good enough :) In that case, bite the bullit and cross your fingers, 'cause there's no way to make sure that they can't screw you over somehow.
Finally you absolutely have to quit your day job in order to give your own idea the 110% attention it needs in order to become a moneymaker. You can NOT expect to make a fortune in your spare time. Actually your prospective investors expect that you spend at least half a year working on your idea ON YOUR OWN DIME... If you don't, well then you haven't shown sufficient confidence in your own ideas, right? They supply the resources, but you have to make them bellieve in you somehow.
To sum it up: Don't bitch - learn about the facts of business before you try to play in the big (or middle) leagues. Unfortunately the only reliable way to learn about business it to try it, so expect to get burnt once or twice. But it's no big deal.... You'll learn, and eventually (hopefully) you'll bag the big one some day.
Just don't count on doing it through amazing code alone, or expect that the venture capitalists are in the fairy godmother business.
Re:We need a unified front (Score:3)
Not true. I insisted on something very much like that in my most recent contract. It depends how much they want you, and for tech people with any skill at all, remember you're in the driver's seat. Think of this little freedom as a benefit the company can give you for free. If you had two equivalent offers but one of them explicitly acknowledged your rights to your off hours, non-company related work, which one would you choose? In my case, and I think this is a technique that will work generally, I said that I was involved in a number of open-source projects and I needed written assurance that my employer would not make any claim on the work I was doing there. Since your employer is most probably benefitting from the open source work you're doing you'll find it an easy argument to make, and it doesn't sound like you're planning to run off with the company's IP. Finally, if you don't ask, you won't get.
--
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:3)
Re:Heed him (Score:3)
Not to say you can't trust them. The point is, the first time you suspect that you CAN'T trust them, you shouldn't ever trust them from that point on.
Sorry. I've been burned before.
Bittersweet advice...
Don't have good friends as roommates. Sure, you want to KNOW the person and you want to be able to get along with them, but nobody can get on your nerves quite like a GOOD friend, and they're a lot harder to kick out if things go sour for some reason.
Don't lend money to friends if you expect to be paid back. If they pay you back, thats an act of good faith on their part that shows their quality. If they don't, you have every excuse not to lend money to them again. Otherwise, that loan will become a tension point and you'd have been better off never lending it to them in the first place.
Don't go into business with anyone who doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on reality. Buisiness that boom overnight are rare, and even more rarely predictable. A friend might have some glorious plan for becoming a millionaire overnight and want you to quit your job and put in 80 hour weeks to help him realize his dream and reap the benefits. Don't hesitate to be the rational mind in the situation. Even if he believes what he's saying, you'll still end up throwing a lot of money and time at a black hole.
However, a sobering business plan, with modest investment, and a reasonable expectation of profits after a period of time that isn't based
on a quackjob theory, THAT might be something that interests me. Sure, it doesn't sound like its got the potential to turn me into an overnight millionaire, but at least I'd have better faith in the chances.
-Restil
Adam's comments (Score:3)
I am just sorry that he learned them the hard way. If you, (Mr/Ms) Slashdot reader, read no other story today, please read Adam's four warnings [hypermart.net]. Understanding or at least accepting them can literally change your life as a techie.
As somebody else once said, "This is no-shit serious".
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:3)
Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man.
A scary number like 80%+ of all large-prize lottery winners go bankrupt within a few years. Most have no understanding of how to make that money work for them, or to turn it into a renewable resource through wise investment. They spend the $100k/year, even selling the future years' checks before they come in.
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:3)
Well this version is considerably less unpleasant than the first.
Although like that other US saying to be found in many bars "if you are so clever why ain't you rich", I would have to say that if a man was wise perhaps he would have no need for a million dollars.
Phil
Re:Some Balance to this old Story! (Score:3)
1) They didn't back up the source.
2) They left the source entirely in the control of one person. Say he skis head-first into a tree, then where are you?
3) They knew he thought he was being screwed over, and they still didn't back up the source!
Young enough to start again (Score:4)
It is just gutting when your sole vision in life for 5 years is cruelly crushed by large non-feeling corporate entities. But what do you do? Join them, or go against them?
Posta Firsta (Score:4)
when you are a kid, you would probably be more likely to share the profits a bit if it would enable you to act as an adult with your property through this corporation, rather than getting taken advantage of at a young age.
Thoughts upon Adam Hinkley & his actions (Score:5)
Next a few things to ponder upon:
Adam Hinkley sold the rights to his code. He did this without duress & in an apparently legal fashion. He took the money (ok, stock too.)
Later he disagreed with the direction the company who had bought his code was going. Fair enough, it's not unusual for an inventor/founder to become unhappy with the future course of their product, particularly when they've sold control of it.
However Hinkley's solution was to encrypt the source-code for the application & refuse to release it to those who had paid for it. Now I don't know about the rest of you but had I paid someone some large sum of money for the rights to a product then employed them under contract to extend the product I would expect it to be mine. Again Hinkley took the money.
Later (as I recall) it is discovered that Hinkley had apparently misappropriated OTHER code that he'd been previously hired to develop by a previous employer, renaming & reusing it without their permission.
I don't know how other folks view this but when most companies hire someone to write code they expect it to belong to them, not to wander out the door with the employee.
Generally this is clearly spelt out in the employment contract and yes generally the folks who paid for the code get to determine it's license, if any. Sure skills & techniques & code snippets & even architecture go with the employee but not the whole ball-of-wax, line by line to be used in another companies' product.
Yes Adam suffered some devastating personal events. However none of those have any direct bearing on his being compos mentis and signing contracts. At some point one has to take responsibility for one's decisions, for ill or for good.
Finally note that Adam did not do this all without advice. His father assisted him in the decisions, was involved in running his business, and they did hire lawyers to help write & review the legal instruments.
Adam had every opportunity to refuse to sign the paperwork, to demand things be put in writing, to simply not go ahead with the deal. However he didn't. He sold his product.
Frankly it all reads to me as a greedy young man who had a good idea, sold it, then when he realized he'd lost control regretted it & attempted to renege on his obligations. It's great that he was so committed to the product, a pity he'd sold away his control of it. That the courts have not backed him up is not surprising, he has shown little reason for them to do so.
What's the lesson to be learned from all of this?
- Be legally smart.
- Understand what one is getting into.
- Realize that when something is sold it no longer belongs to you.
- Understand that one can't later renounce contracts.
- Accept that there are no legal 'outs' for personal disaster; distraction & grief are not sufficient to invalidate one's commitments.
- Respect that if one is capable of signing a contract one is expected to honor that contract.
- Take responsabilty for one's actions and fulfill ones obligations.
After Adam Hinkley sold his product to Hotline he was no longer it's owner. This was trivially clear beforehand whether he recognized it himself or not. That the company may have different goals & directions for Adam's product should have occurred to him earlier & provisions been made. Without those he was simply another employee with a valued position, a paycheck & a block of stock. To attempt to then hold material hostage in order dictate terms to the new owners was stupid & illegal. To attempt to remove the materials to another jurisdiction was even more stupid. That the legitimate owners of the material were forced to bring in the law & have a search made to return their property was sad but justified - the code was theirs as much as any other corporate asset, physical or intellectual.Sob stories make for interesting reading but aren't particularly compelling. Perhaps next time Adam will have matured a bit & treat going into business with the seriousness it requires, respect the implications of signing a contract.
Finally, here's the only source-material I could find: HL Afterbirth [macrules.com].
The Hotline Saga (Score:5)
It's been a while, so I don't remember the particulars of this case exactly.
Adam was a kid who wrote hotline, a very sophisticated client/server filetransfer/chat app, which very quickly was picked up by the warez community. It was light years ahead of anything in the field (this was 3(?) years before Napster, to put things in perspective).
Due to the popularity, a group of businessmen decided to fund further development of the app...Adam joined them, signing over his code. He moved to canada and worked on the project. Eventually, though, he realized that the business people were screwing him over. After trying, naively, to get them to change their ways, they reminded him of the contracts he had signed regarding his code. Adam suddenly realized that he no longer 'owned' his code. To make a story short, he PGP encrypted everything on the computer he was using and flew back to .au.
The company was forced to reverse-engineer hl, resulting in version 1.6 (1.7?) or so, which included banner ads and a PC version. This was the death knell of the hotline community, which finally degenerated to the land of w4r3z kiddies it is today.
And now, at 22, Adam's ready to take on the business world again. Go Adam! Kick some ass!
We need a unified front (Score:5)
1. Information and inventions that you are exposed to at work are property of the company, and will not be disclosed without permission.
2. External projects will be performed only off-site unless you are instructed otherwise. No company resources will be used.
3. Off-hours work and inventions are your own.
4. If you're asked to deploy your own off-hours software for business, changes made will be contributed back to the project under the terms of that project's license.
5. In terms of non-competition, software that is used by a competitor, but which does not directly engage in the business of your company will not be considered to be a violation.
Having this, we could then present this to prospective businesses in order to take the pressure off of them to come up with a way to cover their asses. They get a document which the industry has had a chance to review an comment on so that they know what to expect.
Thoughts?
Re:Posta Firsta: Business for Nerds (Score:5)
This is true - your best ideas will probably come while you are young and in school, and working for a corporation will narrow your explorations, and probably steal your best ideas. If you want to make the big dough, and don't mind taking the big risk, start your own company.
Having said that, I still believe post-college is the way to go. If you fail, or the industry collaspes, you will have a degree to fall back on. If you suceed, you will have at least sat through the mandatory lectures, so that you won't get lectured on Slashdot on proper list creation, database design, or basic security.
Roblimo wrote an article earlier today that showed some real business knowledge in the minds behind Slashdot. They've been at this game for a while, and now do what they love for a living. It would be nice to have a series of articles, something like "Business for Nerds, Stuff that Doesn't Seem to Matter But Actually Does", and make it a linked column, rather than a Slashdot post, so that it doesn't get lost in the archives. Something like the FAQ, but updated, and with years (I'm getting annoyed at only using the month and the day as a date stamp on Slashdot posts - how short sighted).
So this is why Hotline started sucking... (Score:5)
It was great at the time, because you didn't have to do the hunt and peck thing with Hotline, or beg for rare tracks on usenet. You could find what you want, frequently by the server's name and/or theme, and then try to upload in response.
Of course, getting a stable version out for Win32 destroyed this rather friendly exchange for the same reason that all of AOL's millions of users make it difficult to use what would otherwise be a pretty good service. People began to use Hotline to try to make money and run scams. Most HL servers, I suspect, are fronts for banner schemes now. These schemes are probably seen by advertisers as part of the primary reasons why the banner market is so unsafe.
I find it ironic that the application's creator was screwed over for the same reason that it's users were: GREED.
I'm glad that he didn't pursue. I don't think it would have been worth his time. Personally, I hope he starts out and creates another great, innovative, killer app.
Re:Young enough to start again (Score:5)
Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man.
Take away a million dollars from a rich man, he will make another million dollars.
The point is, this guy seems to be very intelligent, so I'm sure he can move on with his life and do quite well for himself. Looks as if youthful enthusiasm has now been tempered with the cold steel edge of the real world. Although his message is a little jaded, he seems to have adjusted well to the change, all things considered. Good luck, buddy!