Gotta share a story about software folks and non-competes, releases, and such.
I spent a few very fun years at Heathkit, managing the kit computer and the test equipment businesses. I had a superb software designer working in engineering, named Rod Brahman. Cool guy.
Long before I was on the scene, he and (mostly) Gordon Letwin had developed HDOS, the Heath operating system. It was a pretty cool system, and Gordon had worked out a lot of things that were quite advanced for the time.
Bill Gates showed up at our door one day, and had a sit-down with the guy that would eventually become my boss, Chas Gilmore. He told Chas that the number of computers you can sell is tied directly to the number of programs you can run on them, and that HDOS was going to limit the growth of Heath. Chas bit, and the move to the modern CP/M was on.
On his way out the door, he hired Gordon and took him to Seattle.
A few weeks after moving, Gordon came back into town, and suggested that the whole gang go to lunch together, just like old times. IIRC, they went to Warren's, just a little way from Heath headquarters. So they laughed and reminisced, and after while Gordon tells Chas that it's obvious that HDOS is dead, but he just wants to be sure that it's OK to use what he's learned over the years. He whips out a release, which Chas signed then and there.
And that is why, if you look in the kernel of MSDOS, which came out shortly after that, you find HDOS.
Chas signed away a huge sum of money over lunch that day.
