4 ms·

Initially I thought something along these lines as well. But according to the article, it was common practice: > They’d followed his case in the newspapers and

by lgeek 13y ago

Initially I thought something along these lines as well. But according to the article, it was common practice: > They’d followed his case in the newspapers and noted the shiver it had sent down the spines of Wall Street’s software developers. Until Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs. “A guy got put in jail for taking something no one understood,” as one of them put it. “Every tech programmer out there got the message: Take code and you could go to jail. It was huge.”

RockyMcNuts 13y ago
No way. You sign away any rights to anything you come up with. You get the lecture on it. This guy Serge got shut down when he wanted to open source something. (although GS has open sourced some simple and non-strategic stuff, as a presumable PR move) By both the letter of what you agree to and industry standard it's not really ethical to dump your employer's code into Dropbox or whatever. They go a long way to block it, blocking sharing sites, USB ports, etc. I'm not saying it doesn't happen all the time, just like brokers taking their client lists. People justify it by saying 'really, I'm supposed to look these people up in the phone book?' or 'really, I'm supposed to re-implement this simple function?' How unethical sort of depends on how much of an edge you take, it's one thing if it's stuff you did yourself that would be inconvenient to recreate, the equivalent of your spiral notebook, something else if it's what other people did that would have been impossible to recreate. But I think Serge demonstrates ignorance and naivete by thinking that was normal practice, and both Serge and Lewis demonstrate an ethical blind spot. Did he deserve to be made an example of? I have no idea if he did or why that happened. Maybe there was stuff in there that was viewed as very proprietary. Maybe it was clever, or they just had an inflated sense of its value. Maybe what seemed trivial to Serge seemed extremely valuable and proprietary to GS. Or maybe he just pissed off the wrong guy. Or maybe they were getting poached a lot and decided to take a stand. I don't think we'll ever know. Certainly not based on this article.
- aqme28 13y ago
  But he's arguing that he worked on open-source code, which isn't something he is legally able to sign over the rights of.
  - RockyMcNuts 13y ago
    whatever he or anyone at Goldman did on that open-source code, belongs to Goldman, and he can't assign the rights of or share it, either, it's up to Goldman (and the terms of the license).
    - biero 13y ago
      > it's up to Goldman (and the terms of the license). It is really up to the license, Goldman either selected licenses where they could legally avoid sending upstream changes or planned to violate the law in secrecy. If they did the latter on just one license, then he should qualify as a whistle blower.
      - cowsandmilk 13y ago
        what common open source licenses would require them to send changes upstream? Or really, what licenses would require them to release the modified code to the public? GPL requires you to make source code available to anyone who you distribute the program to. If you're just putting code on servers, there's no obligation. Even if you distribute internally, you usually are technically distributing to the company for installation on their computers. Even the AGPL, designed to be viral for web applications, requires the operator of the server to make the code available to users of the server. Assuming all users were Goldman Sachs employees, I don't see any legal obligation for them to contribute back to the community. Pretty much all other licenses are less copyleft than GPL and AGPL and would be even less likely to trigger source code distribution requirements.
        biero 13y ago
        Sorry to spread FUD, I was under the impression that non-OSI compliant licenses sometimes made this requirement, but I can't find any actual examples so maybe it was an overly cautious question I was always answering 'no' to to get import approval.
chollida1 13y ago
> il Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs. This is a huge grey area, well maybe not so grey right now. Often you can't seperate quants from their excel sheet( or R models) and they will keep these models as they move to new firms. As far as programmers keeping the code they wrote, This is the first time I've ever heard of a programmer, and I'm one, leaving a shop and bringing their code with them. Let's just say, there is no ambiguity what-so-ever about how employers feel about this in the finance industry.
- riskable 13y ago
  The best way to keep your code after you leave an employer is to make it public to begin with. The key is to get permission to make your library open source from the get-go. I've done it before and it worked out very well: People who did not work for my employer contributed patches that made it better. Essentially, we got people to work for us for free! How can you say no to that? If there's nothing proprietary (i.e. trade secrets) you're really better off making it open source. Many employers seem to think that every line of code their developers write is 100% proprietary but they're really doing themselves a disservice with this attitude. That widget library your developers wrote? It is probably less than 1% of your code base and even less of a priority for them. Wouldn't it be better to just put it on the web under an open source license and hope for the best? If your competitors get their hands on it then... What, exactly? They might improve it for you?

by lgeek 13y ago

RockyMcNuts 13y ago

No way. You sign away any rights to anything you come up with. You get the lecture on it. This guy Serge got shut down when he wanted to open source something. (although GS has open sourced some simple and non-strategic stuff, as a presumable PR move) By both the letter of what you agree to and industry standard it's not really ethical to dump your employer's code into Dropbox or whatever. They go a long way to block it, blocking sharing sites, USB ports, etc. I'm not saying it doesn't happen all the time, just like brokers taking their client lists. People justify it by saying 'really, I'm supposed to look these people up in the phone book?' or 'really, I'm supposed to re-implement this simple function?' How unethical sort of depends on how much of an edge you take, it's one thing if it's stuff you did yourself that would be inconvenient to recreate, the equivalent of your spiral notebook, something else if it's what other people did that would have been impossible to recreate. But I think Serge demonstrates ignorance and naivete by thinking that was normal practice, and both Serge and Lewis demonstrate an ethical blind spot. Did he deserve to be made an example of? I have no idea if he did or why that happened. Maybe there was stuff in there that was viewed as very proprietary. Maybe it was clever, or they just had an inflated sense of its value. Maybe what seemed trivial to Serge seemed extremely valuable and proprietary to GS. Or maybe he just pissed off the wrong guy. Or maybe they were getting poached a lot and decided to take a stand. I don't think we'll ever know. Certainly not based on this article.

aqme28 13y ago
But he's arguing that he worked on open-source code, which isn't something he is legally able to sign over the rights of.
- RockyMcNuts 13y ago
  whatever he or anyone at Goldman did on that open-source code, belongs to Goldman, and he can't assign the rights of or share it, either, it's up to Goldman (and the terms of the license).
  - biero 13y ago
    > it's up to Goldman (and the terms of the license). It is really up to the license, Goldman either selected licenses where they could legally avoid sending upstream changes or planned to violate the law in secrecy. If they did the latter on just one license, then he should qualify as a whistle blower.
    - cowsandmilk 13y ago
      what common open source licenses would require them to send changes upstream? Or really, what licenses would require them to release the modified code to the public? GPL requires you to make source code available to anyone who you distribute the program to. If you're just putting code on servers, there's no obligation. Even if you distribute internally, you usually are technically distributing to the company for installation on their computers. Even the AGPL, designed to be viral for web applications, requires the operator of the server to make the code available to users of the server. Assuming all users were Goldman Sachs employees, I don't see any legal obligation for them to contribute back to the community. Pretty much all other licenses are less copyleft than GPL and AGPL and would be even less likely to trigger source code distribution requirements.
      - biero 13y ago
        Sorry to spread FUD, I was under the impression that non-OSI compliant licenses sometimes made this requirement, but I can't find any actual examples so maybe it was an overly cautious question I was always answering 'no' to to get import approval.

chollida1 13y ago

> il Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs. This is a huge grey area, well maybe not so grey right now. Often you can't seperate quants from their excel sheet( or R models) and they will keep these models as they move to new firms. As far as programmers keeping the code they wrote, This is the first time I've ever heard of a programmer, and I'm one, leaving a shop and bringing their code with them. Let's just say, there is no ambiguity what-so-ever about how employers feel about this in the finance industry.

riskable 13y ago
The best way to keep your code after you leave an employer is to make it public to begin with. The key is to get permission to make your library open source from the get-go. I've done it before and it worked out very well: People who did not work for my employer contributed patches that made it better. Essentially, we got people to work for us for free! How can you say no to that? If there's nothing proprietary (i.e. trade secrets) you're really better off making it open source. Many employers seem to think that every line of code their developers write is 100% proprietary but they're really doing themselves a disservice with this attitude. That widget library your developers wrote? It is probably less than 1% of your code base and even less of a priority for them. Wouldn't it be better to just put it on the web under an open source license and hope for the best? If your competitors get their hands on it then... What, exactly? They might improve it for you?