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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

No, it's very clear what he did was wrong. He works in an industry that does not allow you to email code home or copy it off of company computers. Goldman might be a little different, but where I've worked, this was definitely a no, no, and you could easily be fired for doing it.

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According to the original article, Goldman was actually violating the license terms of the open source software it had modified by not releasing it. Further, while you and I may have our opinions, a judge found Goldman's actions to be so egregious that he ordered them to pay the defense costs for someone accused of stealing from them. That is exceedingly rare, and wouldn't have happened if there were any doubts about either Goldman's conduct or the intentions of the programmer.

I don't know details of this case but it's very unlikely GS was violating any FOSS license for just modifying code (assuming internal use only).

I think I see your point, but I wonder... do GS distribute code to their employees? To partner organizations? If so, what are the terms of that distribution? If they are anything other than the original license requires, that's a violation.

Oh noes, now we can't have nice things anymore...

I suggest you read the GPL faq which should help clear up some of the issues for you:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePos...

You can use open source code without giving up your modifications as long as you don't distribute it. Even if a GPL program is modified by GS and runs on their mainframes, GS is not required to release the source code.

You only need to release the source if you're distributing the modified code, which GS obviously would never do...

Goldman was actually violating the license terms of the open source software it had modified by not releasing it.

I down-voted you because people keep saying that and it is false.

The Vanity Fair article uses the qualifier "possibly" when talking about GS violating the licenses and that's because none of the major license families (BSD, GPL, MPL, etc) have a requirement to release modifications if the whole is not released outside the organization that made them. The Vanity Fair article does not say that the code was ever distributed out of Goldman.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...

And none of them have that requirement because distribution inside of an organization does not count as a distribution for the purpose of copyright law. (Though if you let people carry it out of the organization, that's a different story.)

That was a point in the original Vanity Fair article that really caught my attention because it seemed very wrong the way it was stated. None of us know all the details but--based on what was written in that article--it sure doesn't sound like a license violation.

> a judge found Goldman's actions to be so egregious that he ordered them to pay the defense costs for someone accused of stealing from them. That is exceedingly rare,

No, GS will have to pay because the defendant was an officer at GS.

> Further, while you and I may have our opinions, a judge found Goldman's actions to be so egregious that he ordered them to pay the defense costs for someone accused of stealing from them. That is exceedingly rare, and wouldn't have happened if there were any doubts about either Goldman's conduct or the intentions of the programmer.

I don't think this is at all what happened. I think a judge ruled that he was a director at the company and therefor the company had to cover any legal costs he incured due to being a director of the company.

As far as I can tell, Goldman's actions had nothing to do with them paying his legal bills.

From the Vanity Fair article, it sounds like Goldman is in fact violating the terms of the license, but not in the way you're describing. (I.e., not by refusing to release changes.)

According to the article Goldman would routinely strip off the license/copyright from off of the open source code file and replace it with their own copyright. And that is a violation of many open source licenses.

I could be wrong, but wouldn't it only be a violation to release the code after stripping off the license/copyright?

Whoever modified the copyright headers then redistributes the files internally to other programmers and systems. You cannot modify a copyright to your liking and redistribute the work.

Any Russian programmer consider any administrativelimitation stupid, amd has the most of the code carved in his wetware. GS and other bozos can try to sue you for keeping the code in your brain, since you obviously taking our brain home. Or do American programmistas leave their brain in the office to comply?

Oh please. If you're Russian, you and I both know that bureaucracy and administrative detail (especially in terms of printed contracts) is well and alive in Russia. Stop being obtuse.

Fired is one thing, but malicious prosecution is completely out of proportion to a rules violation.

You're conflating the ideas of right and wrong, of law, and of company policy. If something is against policy, that doesn't make it illegal. If something is illegal, that doesn't make it wrong.

>No, it's very clear what he did was wrong.

That might be clear to rubes who believe everything that they see on television.

What's clear to me is that Goldman Sachs wants to ruin this guy's life. Which, to some people, makes him a stand-up guy.

  He works in an industry that does not allow you to email 
  code home or copy it off of company computers.

If you read through some of the subpoena petitions in the docket[1] such as [2] you'll find that the defense was asking for documentation of conversations indicating that it was a normal thing for him to take work home with him, and his supervisors were aware of it. Since most of the evidence is under seal (as some of it contains trade-secret information), it's hard to say if he found the evidence that he needed. But it does look like it he's at least claiming that it wasn't unusual for him to take his work home with him.

For example:

  The defense will demonstrate at trial that Aleynikov
  regularly transferred files offsite and to a local 
  directory on hosts at Goldman’s development network so 
  that he would be able to continue working productively in 
  case of a network outage at Goldman to servers hosting 
  repositories with platform source code. The records 
  requested in Item 21 will demonstrate that shortly before 
  Aleynikov left Goldman, there was an outage that made 
  access to source code unavailable at least for several 
  hours that impacted developers’ productivity. This
  information will aid the defense in demonstrating that 
  Aleynikov did not have the specific intent necessary to
  commit the crimes with which he was been charged.

[1]: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.35... [2]: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.35...

...you could easily be fired for doing it.

Except he wasn't fired; he was sent to federal prison. Those two results are not equivalent.

Wasn't he doing this for the entire time he was employed at Goldman? They only checked _after_ he decided to leave?

Well its a bit of both. Goldman claimed at trial that the code uploaded could be used to manipulate the markets. If a python erlang bridge can be used to do that it is certainly a new one on me. So what he did was wrong. And Goldman was trying to send a message to people leaving. At the time people were leaving their HFT group and they wanted to do anything possible to stem that.

At best this should have been a civil lawsuit. The public almost certainly has no interest in what happened.

Yes he did something wrong and deserved to be fired (if he was still working there), but he definitely doesn't deserve to be facing these ludicrous trumped up charges.

Goldman Sachs have come out of this as the bad guy, throwing their massive legal resources against a single individual.

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