I work for a company that OEMs a product with a published API. They make quarterly updates, but here's the rub...

The updates continually update their back-end in non-backwards compatible ways. We end up running multi-cpu days of regression tests to find what's broke and then spend oodles of man-days tracking down what happened and figuring out workarounds each time we try to update. We're still using the API libraries that are many versions before the latest because of this.

At one point I couldn't figure out how to do something with their API,so I requested example code. They sent part of the source a real product that they market that does what I needed. I soon discovered that they don't use their own published interface, completely bypassing the API classes entierly to get to functionality I can't.

I'd take open source over this pain any day.

[sarcasm]This kind of posturing is nothing new and it's wonderful to see how people can still post responses so rationally.[/sarcasm]

The open source plan put in place by HP is quite refreshing. They have a reasonable time frame to replace all the proprietary pieces with open source ones to get it all out there. They have embraced the homebrew community and made them part of the open-source direction and I wish them well.

Personally, I'm excited about the proposition. WebOS still comes in top in customer satisfaction polls, imagine that.

I have had similar "invention" agreements from all my employers. Their language seems to infer that working for them is the incubation that will bring on new ideas, so even if you're off-the-clock, it is because you are working for them that you came up with the idea at all. However, in the agreements is a request for things that you have/are working on so they will be exempted. I usually include a several page list of things that I've thought about, generic enough to cover almost any field outside of my day to day work.

That said, if you come up with an idea not related to your tasks, they would be very hard pressed to make a case against you. If you come up with a better widget than the one you're doing their, they have a good case.

See my comments above on how to spoof a supported hp printer for your non-supported one. More information on the "print to any printer" thread found on http://forums.precentral.net/

I got around this by using my server and putting three option statements in net-snmp to spoof a "supported" hp printer and then redirecting printer communication to my non-hp printer instead. Took all of 5 minutes. I've got 5 WebOS devices in my house that are heavily used. Curse you HP!

Shades of the 80s! Canon Research created a great little c-like interpreted language called ici. It had all sorts of nifty lisp like features and had a nice API for native extensions. They expected to put it in all of their products (including printers) and even open-sourced it. Outside of a few external projects that I and others had, I don't think it went anywhere.

Set your mail server to relay through your ISP. Most dynamic addresses are blocked via RBLs anyway. Unless your ISP provides reverse DNS of your address a good percentage of your mail will not be delivered. I've been doing this way before they started blocking the ports.

And Apple would never stop you from putting your app on the App Store simply because it steps on their plans to control their platform, right?