>Zuckerberg did a much smarter: took their (simple and intrinsically worthless) idea and built a product and a business on it himself.

What's more revolting is that Zuckerberg agrees to do the work for them and then stalls them so he can steal their idea. You call it smart, I call it being a shady douche bag.

It happens all the time to me and I'm sure to you as well. Someone suggested I implement an iphone app that scrapes the exchange web interface and gives you calendaring, email and all the other goodies because he was stuck logging into a locked down server blah blah blah. All I had to do was code it all up in a weekend and he'd split the money with me.

So lets say I actually looked at the feasibility of it. Now if I go off and implement a revolutionary email program for android and make a billion dollars do I owe him anything?

There are far more engineers burned by business guys stalling and not paying them then there are business guys burned by shady developers.

To put it another way, I am much more scared of a howitzer than of a derringer: there's very high profile and tragic cases of people being killed by derringers (Abraham Lincoln), but there are much more cases of people being killed by howitzers (that we don't even think twice of them).

This is completely irrelevant. Even Zuckerberg knows that he blatantly ripped them off and stalled them so he could execute it himself. Why else would he settle for ~$65M (Err, I should say ~$35M)? Then to add insult to injury, he misrepresents the value of the stock in the settlement.

I might be singing a different tune if he hadn't agreed to do the work for them.

  As for most other developers, when approached by "business guys" my typical reaction is to polite say no.

Luckily a lot of people try to make me promise that I will not copy their idea. I tell them upfront "WAIT! Please DON'T share your idea with me because chances are I have probably already had it in the past and may very well work on it in the future."

So if you are a client and you come to me with an idea about a social network for plumbers that has an inbox feature, the max I might agree to is that I won't launch a similar product for his market...but I would be hesitant to even make that promise. I would never give away my right to have an inbox feature on a future venture, lol. Of course, you can totally make me agree that I will not reuse any code or specific modules I program for you will be yours.

Yet this is how many Silicon Valley (back when the valley was actually about Silicon) start-ups began. Generally, however, the pattern was engineer and manager would identify a business need that real customers have. They would attempt to build it as a "pet project", be stiffed by conservative and hunch-driven product organization and would then both quit and take a large chunk of the engineers along with them.

The reason this succeeded is that NDAs and non-competes are unenforceable in California. Law suits would still come (due to alleged theft of IP, which generally never happened) and be settled out of court for only a small proportion of the the equity the "idea" produced.

Personally, I will stand by my words. If you can't build your idea it's worthless (you can't estimate whether others can either). If everyone else can (welcome to web 2.0), it's worthless as well. Sure you may be able to sue somebody over your idea (but you generally have to have something more, like a claim of IP theft), but your lawsuit proceeds will be a fraction of what the person who "stole" your idea has made out of it. That $65mm doesn't change Zuckerberg's life _a single bit_ (not having another $65mm might only make life easier for him, as that's one less bodyguard to hire to protect it).

On the other hand, if you have a genuinely new idea i.e., you have a new CPU architecture you invented but don't have the ability to build the prototype chip _all by yourself_ then one engineer quitting and competing with you won't succeed unless he _actually_ steals your design (this is real IP theft) and even then you'll likely outdo him (as he'll have a bug for bug copy of your design, whereas you actually understand the design choices).

If management wants to be rich, they have to treat engineers with utmost respect. There's difference between engineers mere _coders_ who turn business requirements into code (usually by gluing software others have written together) and engineers. Spot the engineers early on, challenge them, give them autonomy and responsibility. Let them work on pet projects (Google calls it "20% time", but it's merely a codification of something successful companies had been doing before), tune your product vision with their data.

True for employee noncompetes with no other relevant factors; not true for NDAs.

Nonetheless the idea of "social network for X" is not unique and deserves no protection similar to what a chip architecture or a machine learning algorithm may receive. Not that there aren't ambiguous examples e.g., using SVMs to categorize users of a social network or using an emulated RISC architecture to profile the GUI front-end of a web application (such as a social network) but in the cases the idea is not very useful without the engineering chops to put it into use.

* Apple II had tons of competitors on the market

* Lisa/Macintosh? Xerox PARC roots

* iPod? Tons of poorly constructed devices before it

* NeXT and OS X? Obj C is not the first "C with objects" language, Mach kernel is from CMU

* iPad/Newton? Tons of prior art (the idea itself belongs to Alan Kay)

I have major problems with Apple (they aren't friendly to hackers who don't work at Apple), but the fact that people forgot the predecessors of Apple's devices is only an example of importance of execution.

If these engineers left with only vague product design ideas in their heads (e.g., use triangulation for location awareness, use an accelerometer for rotating the screen) and built their own iPhone work-alike (which is difficult work), I'd side with them as well.

So you're right, one lesson to be learned is 'don't hire some schmoe to build your revolutionary product'.

The other lesson to be learned is 'doing flagrantly illegal things with revolutionary products will get you sued for millions of dollars or worse'.