Comment by neonbat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neonbat | Hacker News Reader

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This kind of thinking is seriously dangerous. This is why burden of proof rests on the state. What something "appears to look like" is irrelevant to the actual crime. That's like saying running from the cops proves your guilt. It doesn't prove anything. Innocent people run all the fucking time because they know the cops will try to violate their rights. Cops are scary. Some people have standard practice to wipe everything. I mean it was his last day at work right? If it was your last day at work, maybe you're just doing general log clearing, like if you were never going to use a browser again one idea might be to wipe the history on that browser, clean out the work station so to speak. Doesn't sound so menacing now does it? Now maybe Goldman has policies against this; it's just an example of how these kinds of non-evidence tangential facts can be used to obscure the reality of a case. Also It would surprise me greatly if this guy was the first guy to wipe his workstation before leaving his job at Goldman.

By all direct accounts the state amply met their burden of proof in this case. The case didn't turn on the bash history; that was part of a much larger pattern of facts.

Just before leaving an incredibly sensitive job in the single most competitive part of the financial sector for a job paying 3x at an arch-competitor of his current firm, a programmer cloned a huge collection of source code --- the majority of which was proprietary and not open source taken from the single most sensitive technical asset at his firm, an asset which his new 3x job at the competitor was to reproduce, and uploaded it to an offshore Subversion hosting service nobody had ever heard of before. Later, he is shown to have presented portions of that code to his new firm.

The only people on HN who think this is OK have that view solely because they think it's OK to do virtually anything to Goldman Sachs, because of the abuses Goldman Sachs has inflicted on the world's giant squid population.

That is a fine and intellectually coherent position to take: firms who harm giant squids do not deserve the protection of law. But people holding that position should be clearer about it, and constrain themselves to squid-based arguments.

The one point consistently being missed is that many open source licenses carry a "taint" with them that causes most commercial companies to avoid them. What does it mean to propagate a program? If an employee checks out a personal copy outside of business hours, is that propagation, or modification of the single licensed copy that the business owns? When two employees modify the code simultaneously, who owns the copies? The amount of taint is irrelevant, either one included license taints it or no included license taints it.

Once a bit of copyleft code is modified and included in a binary, the legal question of whether the result is open source is not trivial and certainly open for discussion. That being said, it is certainly the intention of many people releasing the code under copyleft licenses that any modified work be open source. It is completely unfair to project the idea that all people siding with Mr. Aleynikov do so solely due to animosity towards Goldman Sachs.

It is completely circumstantial that he tried to hide the fact that he made a personal copy. It is often best to avoid having a discussion. I try to hide from my parents the fact that my wife and I... well you get the idea.

Does this have anything at all to do with the Aleynikov case? A great deal of effort was expended on both sides to establish that he did not merely take "tainted" open source code. Are you considering hypotheticals here, or is this stuff you've actually learned from the facts of the case?

> Later, he is shown to have presented portions of that code to his new firm.

If this is true, it's a pretty big smoking gun. You really do your argument a disservice with the squid thing.

What "argument"? I am relaying facts from the filings from the cases.

The squid thing is a nod to Rolling Stone's famous description of GS as a giant vampire squid - many may be unfamiliar with it.

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