General > General Technical Chat
Why do companies try to take patents out on standard schematics?
Bassman59:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on October 26, 2021, 02:42:12 pm ---I've never heard of any company doing this. They normally make their employees sign non disclosure agreements and lots of modern designs are also in software, rather than purely schematics. It sounds a bit silly to me. If I worked somewhere like that, I'd start to look elsewhere.
--- End quote ---
Everywhere I've ever worked, the designs were on servers accessible to everyone in engineering. This included software, firmware and hardware. It was just easier this way. If you needed to see a schematic, you could just grab it, and you didn't have to bother the person who designed it. Lots of design pieces were shared among projects. Even though in general one person did the board design or firmware, there was always open discussion about how to do this or that among the engineering staff because really that's a good way to improve products. And this also made things easier for design reviews. Basically the bosses assumed everyone was an adult.
The only exception was the time I spent working for a defense contractor. Then access to designs was limited because of security reasons. And that sucked, because there was a lot of interesting stuff going on.
TimFox:
There is an important contradiction built into version control for wiring diagrams:
1. A printed copy from the computer server is no longer controlled (since you can't tell by reading it if it be the current version or not).
2. However, troubleshooting or assembling a circuit from a computer screen rather than a paper copy is cumbersome, compared to working from a paper copy that one can mark up.
Point 1 is not trivial: I sometimes found techs working from an obsolete copy, since they thought the one-off being built was the same as the previous one.
coppercone2:
ejeffrey:
Definitely there is a mindset that uses secrecy as a way to signal importance. The line of thinking is basically: If the data is secret, people must want to take it. If they want to take it it must be important. If it is important I must be really smart to have made it"! This is especially common in the minds of management who don't actually understand the details of the documents they are setting policy for. People also tend to both over- and under-estimate the abilities of their competition: they think that nobody else could come up with the genius system that we have, but even a tiny hint and they could leapfrog us.
Secrecy is often a veil for mediocrity.
Just_another_Dave:
--- Quote from: TimFox on October 26, 2021, 09:26:51 pm ---There is an important contradiction built into version control for wiring diagrams:
1. A printed copy from the computer server is no longer controlled (since you can't tell by reading it if it be the current version or not).
2. However, troubleshooting or assembling a circuit from a computer screen rather than a paper copy is cumbersome, compared to working from a paper copy that one can mark up.
Point 1 is not trivial: I sometimes found techs working from an obsolete copy, since they thought the one-off being built was the same as the previous one.
--- End quote ---
Adding a QR code with a link to the last version available (the link should not change when a new version is released to avoid having links pointing to old documents) could partially solve point 1. This is what many scientific journals like MDPI do (they add a QR with the doi code of the article in it), so, as long as the reader is willing to verify that the current version is the one that’s being used, it is always possible to know if there’s a newer version
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