You can certainly make the case that Goldman paid for that code, and if they didn't want it pushed upstream that's their prerogative, but it's a very different thing to sell trade secrets to a competitor (how the mass media has reported the case) and to make a backup of an open-source library you modified at work.
If he incorporated other's insight in to his open source code by adding more code, I would view his actions in an extremely negative light.
When a single bug can do a billion dollars in damage or bankrupt you, nothing is left to chance...
(1) Mechanical changes specific to the company -- this could be as simple as hardcoded hostnames that match the deployment environment.
(2) Implementations of algorithms. In this case it isn't the code that is proprietary so much as the algorithm that the code is an expression of.
I suspect that downandout is talking about defintion #1 and the court is talking about definition #2. Hard to say without seeing the code itself.
That doesn't make any sense. If the code truly were FOSS, why on earth would he copy it from his employer when he could eliminate legal risk by downloading it off the open internet? We know he's not stupid.
He had made changes/improvements to various FOSS projects he was using at Goldman that he wanted to submit as patches upstream but his bosses wouldn't let him. He figured that since he was leaving he might as well take the FOSS code he had modified with him so he could submit patches later. The legality of this maneuver is tenuous at best, as others in this thread have noted, but in my opinion probably doesn't merit years of hounding prosecution and criminal charges.
You haven't met many programmers, have you?
(I'm speaking of myself as well as friends and associates, here.)