Aleynikov has lived in the US for twenty years and owns a house in Chicago. It sounds to me like he is an American programmer, not a Russian programmer. I don't see why his ancestry is relevant.
Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is essentially correct. However this fight is about more than just him. Essentially he took open source that he modified while at Goldman (Which Goldman prohibited him from releasing *fixed). So while his life is ruined (Although he is still better of then 99.99% of people out there) there is a mighty precedent in the works here: employees can't go to jail for legally following license.
"while license explicitly said if you modify it for commercial product you must make your contributions public" I hadn't heard this part of it - what was the license in question?
I originally read it in some in depth article that was talking about this. I can't find this now, so I removed that part. Now that I think about article might have been talking about "spirit" of open source license - if it is useful to you, contribute back, rather then actual license requirement.
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#43A lot of the comments here seem to be oblivious to the details of the original indictment:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/021110aleyn...
It pretty explicitly details how the "backup" program he wrote had flags to select what to copy and some of those flags specifically copied GS option pricing code that he had never worked on.
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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...
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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...
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#46How is this not double jeopardy?
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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...
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#48For those that are interested in the backstory: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...
Wow, he talked to a cop without a lawyer AND signed a confession...
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Re: Russian programmer fights Goldman Sachs and wins one round
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (Which Goldman illegally prohibited him from releasing, while license explicitly said if you modify it for commercial product you must make your contributions public) I don't know the exact details of the case, but just to clarify: under the GPL, you don't have to release your changes if you aren't distributing that commercial product. e.g., If he modified it for in-house use, there is, AFAIK, no legal obligation t…
If he modified it for his own use, then that's clearly the case. If he modified it for the use of others within Goldman, they might have conceivably had a claim to a copy of the source under the GPL; he would not. I'm not entirely sure of that, or of whether employment contracts &c could limit that. For that matter, I'm not entirely sure what the answer should be there.
I think an internal user could easily be persuaded not to demand the source code.