108862704505138477

A com­pany called Affin­ity Engines is claim­ing Google stole the code in Orkut, their social net­work­ing tool.

In par­tic­u­lar, they claim engi­neer Orkut Buyukkok­ten brought over source code from them when he joined Google. They’re cit­ing sev­eral soft­ware defects that are in both sys­tems as proof. If that’s cor­rect, then it’s prob­a­bly a slam dunk case. A lot of peo­ple have to sign a non com­pere agreee­ment when they leave a com­pany for another and in most com­pa­nies, any­thing you write belongs to the com­pany unless there’s a spe­cific agree­ment otherwise.

Of course, Google is a big tar­get right now, so you have to take any­thing in this vein with a grain of salt.

This work, unless oth­er­wise expressly stated, is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.