In Dodgeball/Foursquare's case, how do deals like this work? I assume when you sell a company you also sign a non-compete agreement.
For example, Instagram couldn't have just sold to facebook for $1B then turn around and make the same thing again. Obviously they no longer have rights to the code, but re-creating it wouldn't be that hard if you already did it once. It could be like forking an open source project, except you make a bunch of money.
Is that that in the Dodgeball/Foursquare example, the non-compete was apparently incredibly specific, and this allowed them to make a different location-aware social network?
Those agreements usually are for a certain number of years, not forever. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare, Dodgeball was acquired in 2005 and Foursquare was started in 2009, the same year Google shut down Dodgeball.
For example, Instagram couldn't have just sold to facebook for $1B then turn around and make the same thing again. Obviously they no longer have rights to the code, but re-creating it wouldn't be that hard if you already did it once. It could be like forking an open source project, except you make a bunch of money.
Is that that in the Dodgeball/Foursquare example, the non-compete was apparently incredibly specific, and this allowed them to make a different location-aware social network?