Microsoft Makes a Mea Culpa for Hiring Situation

Of course they want to hire talented open source people, so they can prevent them from ever working in open source again.

Like Dr. Kai-Fu Lee who M$ is in court try to prevent him from working for Google.

What a joke.

Dr. Lee signed a non-compete agreement and properly circumscribed non-compete agreements are legally enforcable.

Note that "ever again" would not be legally enforcable, nor would "working in open source".

People's right to contract (if you tell someone that they aren't allowed to enter into a non-compete agreement, you are limiting their right to make contracts) is balanced against their right to make a living, so Microsoft could never get more than a temporary and limited ban.

dinotrac - agreed on the technicalities, but how does one defend themselves when they had supposedly seen THE CODE! [I think you are citing cases from more liberal states, whereas the judiciary has been skewed much more in favor of business on the federal level.]

Working on free or open source may not leave you in the financial position to afford competent litigators despite the probability of winning, if it becomes a question of being able to afford it. Once you have seen the code, it's a crap shoot with lousy odds.

off-topic from the thread, but it finally penetrated my dim consciousness that ESR got recruiter spam, not a job offer, and made a big hairy deal about nothing.

Oh well, it was amusing.

tuxchick: Yes! Exactly.

Yeah I think ESR is missing the "Good Ole Days" of Halloween 1. Chalk this one up to a mid-life crisis? Been there done that ;-)

Hiring people to keep them from doing other work that might "harm" MSFT is an old trick.

Look at Microsoft Research - people get into MSFT Research and then mysteriously quit publishing, at least publicly.

It was mooted about that MSFT had put virtually every well-known anti-trust law firm on retainer during DoJ vs MSFT trial, to keep DoJ from having access to human anti-trust talent.

When you've got MSFT's bank account, you can do darn near anything. MSFT as a sovereign nation isn't too far off the mark. If MSFT ends up doing notorious evil (as opposed to the banal evil they do currently), history will record that bankroll as the big problem, not merely a market monopoly.