Hey, this is the daily overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today I wanna ask the question: 'How would you feel, if your developer resold your code?'
Alright so first, let me apologise for the lack of formality today, I'm just in a t-shirt
- well, I'm wearing trousers too but you guys can't tell.
The weather is really nice here in England today, it's gonna get up to 26 degrees!
It's beautiful outside, I'm in the office, and for some reason, when it gets nice outside,
the temperate in the office just goes up and up and up, and I think it's the computers
and stuff, it just gets impossible sometimes!
So earlier I was wearing a blazer and I was gonna do the video in a blazer and dress like
the best -dressed man from my childhood, Don Johnson in Miami Vice, but I just wore the
t-shirt today.
So anyway, sorry about that.
So today I wanna talk about an email I got this morning from someone with a few questions
and it was really interesting, I wanted to get your guys take on this.
But first, let me just say thanks everyone for subscribing, if you haven't subscribed
yet please hit the subscribe button and please like (or dislike) this video.
We get a lot of dislikes, you know but...
I don't say that often enough and I know I should at the end of the videos or the beginning
of the videos.
So anyway, thank you everyone who's liked or even disliked the videos, let me know what
you don't like too!
I'm fine with that, I'm cool with that!
So I got this email this morning from somebody saying, and I'm not gonna tell you the specifics
of the email, although they said it was ok, but I don't wanna go into too much detail
on it.
But basically, it was saying this person had hired a developer, a developer they'd worked
with on many projects before, and the developer did a game for them and it's out there on
the app market and everything like that.
But then the developer had other clients too, and he took that project and sold it to another
client and basically re-skinned it.
So it looks almost exactly the same, I mean the game play, everything's the same except
for the image had been swapped out.
But this person had paid for it, so they said "how would you feel about this?
I'm not sure how to respond to it because he seems very apologetic and everything like
that.
He didn't really know if that was bad or not".
And I thought it was.
So I wanna get your guys opinion on this, because there's a sense of code reuse, like,
every developer will reuse some of their code, at least they should.
A lot of times we talk about the security of the source code, like for us, we always
give the source code out to our client after they paid for the application, so they own
all the source code.
So we never give them anything proprietary, that's something that we would reuse again,
but we do have modules and stuff that we've written that make development a little bit
faster.
So stuff like, let's say there's a module that handles push notifications for iOS and
Android, that's something that we might use in different projects and even though it's
included in that project which we give away, but we'll still reuse the modules, or like
helper libraries and stuff like that.
And then there's the case of intellectual property.
So this being, you know, taking an application and basically selling the entire idea, all
the game play, and just skinning it and selling it to somebody else.
See, I think that takes it a step too far, and then I start thinking there's actually
a spectrum here.
For a while, I remember working on one client project and they'd recommended another client
to me who wanted a similar application, and I was actually, because I thought it would
be dishonest to use the code from the first one, I was rewriting the code, like keying
it in another time, doing double entry.
Which was ridiculous.
When the client found out they said "I don't mind if you use the code!" - that was fine
with them, but I got their permission.
But a lot of the times when they're paying for the project, in my opinion, they're paying
for the code that we write, that's what we deliver to them at the end.
So, there's always that kind of thing.
But I've also had one of the development firms I worked with early on, it was a development
firm in India, they were working on some of my apps, but then they were also pitching
me other apps that they'd already made for other clients.
They'd say like "hey we made this security app for this other client - would you like
to buy it?", I'd think, well, did they not go through with this, they'd say "oh no no,
they got it, but we've got all this code, we can sell it to you too" and I was like
"no". and then I started thinking "hang on, are you doing this with my apps to other people?"
Because that is one thing.
See as a business owner, as a developer, you reuse a bit of code, you have a good function
here, you have a lot of stuff that's just very generic, it does what it does.
It makes the job a little bit easier.
And then you've got stuff that's specific to the application.
It's almost like the intellectual property of the application.
So this company in India, they wouldn't stop pitching me things.
Eventually I stopped working with them.
And another thing they'd always do is they would take my apps and use those to market
to other people.
So I was getting their spam messages, like their cold emails, even though I was already
a client of theirs in the past, and they were listing all these apps that they had done
in the past, and they were all my apps!
I knew that they hadn't done them all, I knew that I'd hired other designers, other people
for other parts of it, but because they'd done part of the development they were passing
that off as their own and that really made me upset!
Which got me to thinking about this problem too.
As a developer, I Think it's fine to reuse a bit of code, I think it's expected, but
to reuse an entire app and sell it on to somebody else, I think that's really wrong, but it's
also something we have to specify early on in a project.
When you hire someone, you have to think, they have to know that "Hey this code you're
working on, this belongs to me, everything that I paid for.
It could belong to you if I haven't paid for it yet, but in the end, that belongs to me,
or that belongs to my client.
You have no access, no rights to sell that on later.
You can use functions and stuff like that, you've gone through all the learning".
And a lot of the times, when we learn something new, we have a problem, a lot of the problems
with development is having these problems that we have to solve as we go through, and
once thy're in our mind, it's easier to solve them the next time, and if we have a bit of
code to refer to, it's even easier because we've been through all that before and development
just gets faster as you go.
Anyway, I wanted to get your guys take on this, what do you think?
Because I think it's completely wrong.
I think, if somebody pays for an application, especially if its just a re-skin, because
then you're talking about indirect competition with somebody else.
So as a developer I don't mind a little bit of code reuse, in fact, and as a business
owner I don't mind a little bit of code reuse, because a good developer has a tool set - a
set of code snippets - that they use, you know, they reuse over and over again.
but as a business owner, anybody who's gonna take the source code of any of my applications
and give it to somebody else, I would be extremely upset.
But I realise, having been in the app market for a while, that the code itself is not everything,
so they could sell the code to somebody else and that other person, they would have to
go through all the same marketing efforts I did, they'd have to go through everything
else to get to the places that I am with those applications.
But still, if it's something I pay for, it's something I should be able to keep.
What do you guys think?
I think I was getting angry when I read this email a little bit and then I was thinking,
try to think of the developers side, you know, they've written this code, maybe they should
try and maximise the profits from it?! but it depends on the contract between them.
So, what do you guys think?
I'd be really interested to hear what you say!
First of all, are you a developer or do you hire developers?
And based on that, how do you feel about this kind of stuff?
So anyway, that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys tomorrow!
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