Bad people management (Was Herds of cats)

[jmdeschamps at gmail.com]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
>
> > Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> writes:
> > > Alex Martelli wrote:
> > >> Not a bad point at all, although perhaps not entirely congruent to
> > >> open
> > >> source: hiring key developers has always been a possibility (net of
> > >> non-compete agreements, but I'm told California doesn't like those).
> >
> > California places pretty strict limits on non-compete agreements. I
>
> Yep, this is roughly what I'd heard, and what I meant above.
>
> > was at Ingres when their parent company - ASK - got bought by CA. CA
> > required people choosing to leave the company to sign an agreement
> > that included *their* standard non-compete clause before getting the
> > separation cash. Enough people left that found this clause irritating
> > that it got take to multiple lawyers. Every last one of them declared
> > it unenforceable in CA.
>
> Tx for the anecdote, which does appear to reinforce the point.  I assume
> CA's non-compete clause was fine in NY (I'm guessing that's where their
> lawyers would be) and they didn't consider the state differences...
>
>
> > > The essential difference, it seems to me, is that buying the company
> > > gets you control over the company's proprietary technologies, whereas
> > > hiring the developer only gets you access to the development skills of
> > > the people who've been involved open source developments.
> >
> > But it's not at all clear which of these is the more desirable
> > outcome.
>
> Good point.  I guess the only real answer is, "it depends".  But because
> of this SH's point should be rephrased as, "buying the company ONLY gets
> you control", etc, to emphasize the paralellism.  Even where non-compete
> agreements ARE enforced, by buying a company you're still not assured of
> getting *access to the development skills* -- even if those developers
> are forced to keep working for you, if they feel they're doing it under
> duress because you're legally twisting their arm, it seems very unlikely
> that you'll get much of anything USEFUL out of them (and I would be
> astonished if strict non-compete agreements still applied if you FIRED a
> developer, rather than the developer choosing to leave...).
>
> > CA bought ASK to get control of Ingres, which their Unicenter
> > product used as a database. The *entire* server software development
> > group left, meaning CA had all the sources and technologies, but none
> > of the talent that created them. We called this the $300 million
> > source license.
> >
> > CA pretty clearly got screwed on this deal. They have since
> > open-sourced the Ingres product.
>
> I'm not sure the two sentences in your last paragraphs are really as
> causally connected as one might think;-).  After all, didn't SAP also
> opensource their own DB (I believe they now have a partnership with
> MySQL to try to commercialize it), although in different circumstances?
>
> IOW, it seems to me that, apart from Oracle, nobody's making money on
> databases any more (I believe Microsoft is now giving away SQL Server
> for free, although maybe not the largest "enterprise" edition and surely
> not in open-source form -- of course, MS can afford a *lot* of money
> losing ventures, because Windows and Office bankroll the entire company
> to a highly "ca-ching" degree;-); so, companies whose money making
> depends on applications sitting on top of the DB (true to some extent of
> CA, to an even larger one of SAP) may opensource it both to (they hope)
> get some free support for it AND to minimally undermine Oracle (who uses
> its DB revenues to bankroll multipronged attacks and acquisitions into
> the field of enterprise applications).
>
> Still, I'm not disputing that CA "got screwed"... though it looks like
> they did it to themselves -- they didn't stop to consider the need to
> WOO developers to actually get them onboard as a part of the overall
> deal, just sort of assumed they "came with the package"!-)  Bad people
> management must be close to the #1 cause of failure of promising mergers
> and acquisitions (and I'm not sure the qualifying part of this sentence,
> after "failure", is needed;)...
>
>
> Alex
Not really in the same vein but " Bad people management must be close
to the #1 cause of failure of promising ..." software projects.
Mind you, sometimes that just mean, minding one's self.