Trade secret disputes

If you can’t stand in the competition, just kill it. This holds true for all MNCs (multi nationals). While I was going through some of the news on Cnet, encountered an interesting one saying that Google is accused for Code theft.  One of the silicon valley start ups called Affinity Engines filed a law suite against Google claiming that one of the Ex Googlers stole the code for popular Social Networking Sites called Orkut.com (specially famous in Brazil if you check out its user demography)

The whole story can be found here:

If you analyze affinity’s argument, there are following strengths and weaknesses

Strengths:

Affinity Engines asked Orkut Buyukkokten to return a CD containing source code for its social networking product, but Buyukkokten declined to return it. Along with that, Orkut Buyukkokten promised he would not develop a competing social networking service when he left to join Google but after his joining, Google came up with social networking website.

Weaknesses:

Affinity Engines has declined the Google’s offer to allow a neutral expert to compare the code in the two programs and to evaluate it

Based on my perception, Affinity Engines should accept the Google’s offer to compare the code with a neutral expert. By doing this, it will expose all copied source code.