Apple gives up legal war on iPhone CPU wizard who co-founded Nuvia

Apple has abandoned its lawsuit against its former chief chip architect Gerard Williams, just over three years after accusing him of breaching his contract to found Arm-compatible chipmaker Nuvia. The case, filed in a Santa Clara Superior Court in Silicon Valley in late 2019, alleged that Williams, who for more than a decade …

[Jemma]

If I was him...

I'd smile sweetly and have my lawyers state that Crapple stop using any chip that has any of my IP in it tout suite or pay me a big fat royalty for every single one that's sold. $100 per individual chip should do it

Because if Crapple have given up on a lawsuit that means they know its got as much chance of success as the Electrobigot has of being likeable, ie zero - which means they've wasted everyone's time, caused innumerable amounts of unnecessary stress to lots of people for no reason and generally been Apple grade assholes all round. I'd want to make sure they think twice about doing it again for the n-th time...

Nothing personal you understand...

[Martin-73]

Re: If I was him...

Not sure why the downvotes, apple is most definitely an evil company, (as are samsung, i'm not blinkered)...

[Martin-73]

Re: If I was him...

Ah I see i picked up a downvote for a simple statement of fact, must be fanbois

[david 12]

Re: If I was him...

It wasn't my downvote - I couldn't be bothered -- but if you think that waffle about "$100 per individual chip should do it" passes for humour, then you must be very easily entertained.

[Martin-73]

Re: If I was him...

fair enough re: vote total, either hating apple is becoming a bit boring or there are lots of fanbois. I follow louis rossmann tho so i may be biased, have a drink tho, all of you, even the downvoters, it helps the pain go away

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: If I was him...

IP generated in the course of his employment would, in absence of an agreement to the contrary, normally belong to the employer.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: If I was him...

Wow is america that bad, that nobody goes home for the night or has weekends or holidays ?

[RustyNailed]

Re: If I was him...

When I worked for a large multinational in the UK, my contract explicitly stated that they got first dibs on anything that I created while employed, regardless of whether that was during work time or my own time. I could not even contribute to open source projects in my free time without that being reviewed and approved by management first.

The merits can be debated, and regardless, it's a fairly standard contract clause as I understand it.

When I started at my previous (German) employer, there was a similar clause, although not quite so restrictive, covering certain out of hours activities that might intersect with work concerns. I requested, and got, a specific change to that clause so that I could "freelance" outside of company time as long as it was not in sectors my employer was active in.

I did the same with my new employer....

R

[Martin-73]

Re: If I was him...

Fairly sure in the UK that would fall foul of the unfair contract terms legislation, the employer does NOT OWN YOU, they own the work you did ON THEIR TIME, ONLY.

[Martin-73]

Re: If I was him...

to be fair that's not what Doctor Syntax said... in the COURSE of his employment... IE during working hours (I am assuming simple misunderstanding). If very good chemist is employed by plastics co to invent new plastic, and does so, that plastic belongs to company... mr VGC may well be credited even officially, but the patent/whatever belongs to the company. This is normal

[Slipoch]

Re: If I was him...

The issue would be that any IP he developed while there would be owned by Apple.

[DS999]

The Nuvia founders' lock-in with Qualcomm expired a month ago

It was supposedly 24 months and the acquisition completed Mar 31 2021.

Maybe Apple is dropping the case because he's coming back? It is at least possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely it's because they'll lose

Non-compete is unenforceable, but until there's an actual court decision they can still use the threat of legal action, simply because defending is expensive.

Once there is a court decision, the legal precedent makes attempting to sue any other former employees far more risky, and perhaps even being deemed a vexatious litigant.

[CowHorseFrog]

Im truely shocked that America the land of freedoms would be so anti competitive.

[Chris Evans]

History repeats its self

I recently read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502

the parallels are uncanny!

Motorola had the expensive (and complex for its time) 6800 the designers wanted to design a simpler CPU but management said no, so they left and designed the 6502. Acorns knowledge of the 6502 in the BBC Micro was key to their designing of the ARM CPU.

[Missing Semicolon]

Scenix SX-28

A bunch of engineers at Microchip got fed up with the lack of impetus to improve the venerable and inefficient 4-clock-per-instruction PIC architecture, and went off to found Scenix. The SX-series where pipelined 1-clock per instruction devices that went (for the time) blazingly fast (up to 75MHz), that, whilst sharing no hardware elements, nonetheless used the same instruction set. I seem to remember that Microchip got very sniffy about it, and the line didn't last long. I still have a few, with the sx-key, in a box.