What really irks me about asking Slashdot about the morality of shaping is that you already know the types of responses you will receive.

The above response was modded to 5:Insightful, which really shows you what agenda Slashdotters have on network access:

Application of QoS/Shaping is not EVIL. Failing to give lower QoS (including shaping) of the 5 percent of users who are damaging the reliability of a service for 95% is ludicrous.

The costs involved in these file sharers is significantly greater than the mean, and it is quite likely that no significant Service Level Agreement is in place for home users.

Many of the arguments about legal liability are fallacious and scaremongering.

Any ISP who provided a contract which said or implied that actual download speeds were equivalent to access speeds would be foolish to say the least. I have never seen such a thing.

In the case that 5% of people are upset with throttling, it's financially in the company's interest to let them leave.

Given that at least half of peer-to-peer traffic is other peoples' copyrighted material, you have no obligation to assist people to break the law. Threats of legal action could readily be countered by profiling/capturing the traffic sent through the ISP for legal discovery purposes.

I understand that there are many open source users who would readily make use of peer-to-peer systems. I would suggest that you provide a local mirror for open-source projects, which would limit your upstream costs, and remove the need to use peer-to-peer systems to retrieve open-source updates.

Apart from the issues arising from the prior company's intellectual property (source code, architecture, bugs), rewriting an application doesn't give you any intellectual property protection if someone in India or China decides to do the same thing to you.

So, it is worth seeing if there's a new way of tackling the task (a business process, a novel architecture) that can be patented. This would give the new company some intellectual property to build their application on.

Of course, it's not even worth thinking about the problem until you are completely disengaged from the prior company. That sort of chicken and egg problem has its own legal ramifications ( if you think up the inventive step while at the existing company it may be 'work for hire' ).

My personal preference is to go and invent something else. I'd be bored stupid reimplementing someone else's idea of a product.