Now that I've turned the corner on my various sicknesses, I guess I can get back to blogging about all the stuff I wanted to blog about while I was sick...

What is more valuable: their wisdom, advice and support, or secrecy?

I read a quite wonderful article recently entitled Startups Guide : The NDA Foul. Go read the piece now. I've had the opportunity many times in my career to sign a high and mighty NDA. If I didn't have a family to feed, or had more open source opportunities where I live, I might actually refuse to sign them. Apparently, there are many that do. However, I never felt myself limited by the NDA. Think about the usual things that an NDA talks about.

1. Keep Source Safe - This basically means don't publish source to the web. You don't own it, don't share it. This applied to me, except for potential licensees, and honestly, the code I see most is web application code, and the usual ways to protect that are to just not share it. Licensing the code to someone? They get to see the source. Have fun with that...
2. Don't Divulge Confidential Information - If I have worked on anything "top-secret," marketing has always blabbed before I even knew requirements. How am I supposed to keep things quiet when my competitor's marketing guys know more than I do? I remember a time when I went to a employer's client's client's office, and they knew more about the future of the product I was working on than I did at the time...
3. Keep Your Mouth Shut About Security Related Issues - This is the only time I've felt like my NDA ever really limited me, and honestly, the reason they wanted me to keep my mouth shut wasn't to give them time to fix the gaping security holes, it was because they didn't want to budget the time and money to fix them. So really, the NDA wasn't the problem, only a band-aid to make sure the problem doesn't get worse. At that point, the NDA is hurting the organization more than it is helping it. We saw cases where the issues were beign exploited, and we did nothing about it.

So the question is, what does an NDA really do? Does it promote new ideas? Does it give your company an "edge"? Or is it really just creating an environment of social disconnect, along with fear of having someone else also have your idea. Instead of worrying about everyone else, why not just make a product that remains frontrunner to hundreds of copycats that follow?