Obstacles to contribution in embedded Linux - NDAs

Posted Jun 15, 2015 0:13 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Obstacles to contribution in embedded Linux - NDAs by dlang
Parent article: Obstacles to contribution in embedded Linux

since when do companies not accept NDAs signed by other companies? That's a pretty routine thing to have take place

They accept them and require them; they just don't accept them in place of an NDA signed by someone else. If a company insists on John promising not to disclose as a condition of giving a data sheet to John, the company will not accept an NDA from Mary instead.

I've heard of a variation where the company with the secret requires the employer to treat the secret as its own and pay for any damages if its employee ever divulges the information, but that just means the engineer is prevented by his own employer from ever divulging the information. That's exactly the same thing in its effect on an engineer's ability to publish the information in a kernel patch.

Obstacles to contribution in embedded Linux - NDAs

Posted Jun 15, 2015 1:28 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

My experience has been that NDAs are company to company and employees are required to keep company confidential information to themselves. This includes anything they learn as part of the NDAs the company signs.

If you are somehow seeing this as unethical, I don't know how to start discussing the issue with you.

Now, if you are willing to bypass the "NDAs are unethical" discussion and talk about how datasheets should not be so secret, that's a discussion we can have, and I'll agree with you (after all, if a datasheet is secret, how does an engineer know enough to pick your product?) With the increase of things being designed by small companies, I think the datasheet secrecy is going to eventually collapse as people pick products that they can get info on over ones they have to sign NDAs just to learn about. but It has taken us several decades to get to the point where secret datasheets are considered the norm, and i think it will take a while (but probably not as long) to move back.