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Comment on Managing Staff-Plus Engineers (2020)parent

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Wait, Cisco stole it's first router, with the founders being forced to resign from Stanford as part of how the criminal charges got dropped.

Or are you talking about the Stanford Blue Box?

I am referring to Bill :)

On a side note, maybe the reason why every major company here has accusations of stealing ideas is that it's much easier to accuse someone than it is to actually take a real risk and build a successful product and business around it... I struggle to think of someone good who doesn't also have an unwarranted accusation against them (Carmack being the most recent example).

Outlawing non-competes made this Valley, and people here largely value freedom of innovation and execution over rent seeking of someone else's mind and ideas. Culturally speaking, this is the West Coast hacker ethos to a tee. Bringing suits, regulations, and lawyers to the party will only lead to our demise.

Accusations?

They openly stole Bill Yaeger's work, and never denied it. Bill wasn't an early employee of Cisco.

We're not talking about non-competes here, we're talking about taking source code and board designs verbatim and just swapping out the copyright assignments and adding "Cisco". All of this pontificating about trying tear people down who dared to take a risk is really gross in that context.

Yikes. Where can I read more about this? I wasn't able to dig anything up myself readily through online searching. If this is indeed the case, then you are absolutely right, and I would even fully redact what I said.

Edit: Yes, you're right, what a sad story :( and of course it is largely covered up to the point where people can easily be mistaken about it.

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