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Were there any legal repercussions? Was the employee fired? Were you as calm about this at the time as you seem now?... I would be furious! EDIT: For some reas

Were there any legal repercussions? Was the employee fired? Were you as calm about this at the time as you seem now?... I would be furious! EDIT: For some reason I assumed OP was the author. Someone with a twitter account should ping him and get him over here to participate in discussion.

brendangregg 5y ago
I was in shock, and a bit furious at being ripped off, but didn't feel there was a lot I could do about it. I edited this bit out (I was trimming the post): "You might wonder why I didn't talk about this first case publicly at the time. I'd already informed them of the problem privately and how to fix it, so there wasn't more to say. Also, Sun was the number one employer in town, and to be publicly critical could be career ending." I don't know what happened to the US developer. But I didn't think it made sense to burn bridges with Sun about it. I was more worried about giving people a bad experience with DTrace by running older versions of my software.
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Sun was the number one employer in town in Australia? What?!
  - brendangregg 5y ago
    Sorry, should have said "tech" employer, and this is referring to Sun and its ecosystem. A few years earlier I gave a talk to a local University about the job market and asked the comp sci students to have a showing of hands as to whether they thought they'd work on Windows or Solaris when they graduated. Most hands went for Windows. Then I showed the local job statistics: Sun Solaris was number one.
    - yitchelle 5y ago
      I come from Melbourne and know that there are several rather large multimational engineering centers in Melbourne around this time period. Ericsson, NEC and Robert Bosch comes to my mine.. Perhaps largest in Sydney...Great article btw!
    - phist_mcgee 5y ago
      How fantastically different to my experience. I graduated 2010 in Australia, and we were just entering into the pre-cloud age. A lot of us expected to either move to SV or just work at local consultancies for banks or insurance companies (which I did). 10 years earlier, I would have gone to work at Sun!
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      A few years earlier? I thought Solaris is being completely eclipsed by Linux. Even windows are surprising because hardly anything except gaming and limited local clients are windows. Granted some people choose to develop on Windows.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  Are there no legal recourse options for breaking the license so blatantly?
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    As he said, he did not want to burn his bridges.
    - rorykoehler 5y ago
      That’s a pretty interesting thought experiment. How likely is it to burn bridges with a multibillion dollar corp by taking them to court to protect your IP? They might even respect you for it. Most likely the people working there will move on eventually and especially if they are responsible for IP theft that results in a heavy legal bill. Companies sue each other over ip all the time and then still do business with each other. I’m also assuming OP’s bridges with the persons directly responsible are already burnt. So which bridges exactly are being protected?
      - scubakid 5y ago
        I don't know much about law, but I wonder what the ballpark out-of-pocket legal costs might look like for an individual going after a large corporation with an IP suit... i.e. how likely is it the corporation could win simply by dragging out proceedings and exhausting your resources / burying you with legal fees?
        rorykoehler 5y ago
        You’re right but it kind of renders copyright law to be another elitist construct. I wonder if there are lawyers or organisations who take up these types of cases to negate the behaviour you have outlined. Would EFF for example find it in conflict with their mission?
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        You don't need to get into legal proceedings, if the facts are clear. If you can prove it's your invention, and they're distributing it without your permission, they won't want to waste money defending a suit. You may be a little guy, without enough dosh to launch a suit; but you could sell your interest to $COPYRIGHT_TROLL, then they'd be in trouble. So just ask them nicely to propose a settlement. It's not like war, or anything; tech-company legal departments are there for just this kind of thing. Unless there are arseholes involved, it can all be friendly and business-like.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  Wouldn’t you have made significant bank if you had sued? To the extent that you never had to work for a paycheck ever? Just curious if a lawyer consult might have been useful.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    Brendan has "made more bank" since then than he could have made in that one suit or since that suit if he'd filed it. Brendan's a pretty big shot nowadays and is almost certainly very well compensated, but when you demonstrate that you're too happy to sue you tend to get discriminated against, so if he had sued... it might have ended his career.

brendangregg 5y ago

I was in shock, and a bit furious at being ripped off, but didn't feel there was a lot I could do about it. I edited this bit out (I was trimming the post): "You might wonder why I didn't talk about this first case publicly at the time. I'd already informed them of the problem privately and how to fix it, so there wasn't more to say. Also, Sun was the number one employer in town, and to be publicly critical could be career ending." I don't know what happened to the US developer. But I didn't think it made sense to burn bridges with Sun about it. I was more worried about giving people a bad experience with DTrace by running older versions of my software.

sydthrowaway 5y ago
Sun was the number one employer in town in Australia? What?!
- brendangregg 5y ago
  Sorry, should have said "tech" employer, and this is referring to Sun and its ecosystem. A few years earlier I gave a talk to a local University about the job market and asked the comp sci students to have a showing of hands as to whether they thought they'd work on Windows or Solaris when they graduated. Most hands went for Windows. Then I showed the local job statistics: Sun Solaris was number one.
  - yitchelle 5y ago
    I come from Melbourne and know that there are several rather large multimational engineering centers in Melbourne around this time period. Ericsson, NEC and Robert Bosch comes to my mine.. Perhaps largest in Sydney...Great article btw!
  - phist_mcgee 5y ago
    How fantastically different to my experience. I graduated 2010 in Australia, and we were just entering into the pre-cloud age. A lot of us expected to either move to SV or just work at local consultancies for banks or insurance companies (which I did). 10 years earlier, I would have gone to work at Sun!
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    A few years earlier? I thought Solaris is being completely eclipsed by Linux. Even windows are surprising because hardly anything except gaming and limited local clients are windows. Granted some people choose to develop on Windows.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rorykoehler 5y ago
Are there no legal recourse options for breaking the license so blatantly?
- user-the-name 5y ago
  As he said, he did not want to burn his bridges.
  - rorykoehler 5y ago
    That’s a pretty interesting thought experiment. How likely is it to burn bridges with a multibillion dollar corp by taking them to court to protect your IP? They might even respect you for it. Most likely the people working there will move on eventually and especially if they are responsible for IP theft that results in a heavy legal bill. Companies sue each other over ip all the time and then still do business with each other. I’m also assuming OP’s bridges with the persons directly responsible are already burnt. So which bridges exactly are being protected?
    - scubakid 5y ago
      I don't know much about law, but I wonder what the ballpark out-of-pocket legal costs might look like for an individual going after a large corporation with an IP suit... i.e. how likely is it the corporation could win simply by dragging out proceedings and exhausting your resources / burying you with legal fees?
      - rorykoehler 5y ago
        You’re right but it kind of renders copyright law to be another elitist construct. I wonder if there are lawyers or organisations who take up these types of cases to negate the behaviour you have outlined. Would EFF for example find it in conflict with their mission?
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        You don't need to get into legal proceedings, if the facts are clear. If you can prove it's your invention, and they're distributing it without your permission, they won't want to waste money defending a suit. You may be a little guy, without enough dosh to launch a suit; but you could sell your interest to $COPYRIGHT_TROLL, then they'd be in trouble. So just ask them nicely to propose a settlement. It's not like war, or anything; tech-company legal departments are there for just this kind of thing. Unless there are arseholes involved, it can all be friendly and business-like.
ramraj07 5y ago
Wouldn’t you have made significant bank if you had sued? To the extent that you never had to work for a paycheck ever? Just curious if a lawyer consult might have been useful.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Brendan has "made more bank" since then than he could have made in that one suit or since that suit if he'd filed it. Brendan's a pretty big shot nowadays and is almost certainly very well compensated, but when you demonstrate that you're too happy to sue you tend to get discriminated against, so if he had sued... it might have ended his career.