An Unbelievable Demo
I have a similar experience to this myself.<p>A long time ago (early 2000s) I wrote a handful of tools to ease physical to virtual (P2V) migration for Windows Server. I was a systems administrator in the UK working for a large American firm.<p>I wrote the tools in my own time and unlike in other countries my employer had no ownership of them, just to clear that up at the start. I did use these tools at work but never developed them on company time or resources. They were released as open source.<p>Fast forward 6 months and we had a meeting with a virtualisation consultancy trying to sell us some tools to assist in a wider P2V programme. We had a sales guy and a tech guy visit to show us their stuff. After half an hour of them talking up all they can offer the tech guy fired up a tool and I instantly recognised it was <i>my</i> tool but with some rebranding.<p>My manager looked at me slightly confused as he recognised it too. I let them continue for a few minutes to properly confirm my suspicions then mentioned that this tool was in fact a tool we already use. They were very confused until I loaded up my version on a remote system to show them.<p>Needless to say the rest of the presentation was extremely awkward. I believe these two gentlemen thought they were in fact their own tools developed in house. It turned out several of &quot;their&quot; tools were in fact rebranded versions of mine.<p>I would love to say there was some kind of exciting conclusion but in reality all that happened was they were clearly spooked by this as their&#x2F;my tools were removed and never included again in their P2V toolkit.<p>I suspect the moment they left the meeting with us they called to report what happened and rather than risk me following up (not sure how I could do that to be perfectly honest, it was FOSS after all just not used the proper way) they decided it would be safer to just pull these non-critical tools. They were just &quot;nice to haves&quot; anyway.<p>My boss excitedly share the experience with the team and we had a good laugh about it and how the sales guy went from Mr Confident to stammering and stressed in a matter of seconds.<p>We never did buy their toolkit.