Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 23:04, Mike McCarty wrote:
>
>>Bryan J. Smith wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 19:03 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
>
>
>>After the engineers complained that there would be a massive
>>editing effort to modify *comments*, the lawyers of Company A
>>and Company B got together, studied the law, and concluded
>>that, to comply with the law, Company A must perforce modify
>>all documents, including non-disclosed proprietary trade
>>secret source, even in comments, so that the now trademarked
>>term did not appear anywhere.
>>
>>The engineers gritted their teeth, and did a massive search
>>and edit to modify the source.
>
>
> This sounds like you had really bad lawyers (shades of gray I know) that
> acceded to the request of the other company. Probably as a quick way to
> just settle the complaint. In other words it would have cost more to
> defend against the complaint than it cost to give in. :)
I don't know about that. I only know that we did a "death march".
Each department got a rough estimate of how many files were
involved, divided them up amongst the engineers, and went at
it. We edited files until our fingers were numb, changing
DEX(R) to DSCDEX(R) in all kinds of places. Even years later,
we occasionally would find one, and "fix" it.
We couldn't just use SED or something like it for a variety of
reasons, including the fact that we had files in Word, Framework,
and other special formats. Also, case was sometimes an issue.
But a lot of it was assembly source, and that wasn't too bad.
I wrote up some scripts for my editor which could process
all the files in a directory pretty quickly. But then I'd have
to go back and do diffs, and examine by hand that things were
ok.
Of course, we had to re-build and re-submit all programs to QA.
Ugh!
Mike
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