23 ms·

Ex-Goldman Programmer Found Guilty

88 points by takinola 12y ago

chollida1 12y ago
From the article: > Mr. Marino did not challenge the underlying facts of the case. Instead, he said they added up not to a crime but to a simple breach of Goldman’s confidentiality policy. > “There’s no doubt Mr. Aleynikov did something wrong,” he told the jury, stopping occasionally to sip from a water bottle he clutched to throughout the closing statement. “But this is a very badly misguided case.” There has been a lot of misinformation surrounding this case. I think its well established now that Sergey Aleynikov did indeed take more source code than just his open source contributions with him, his lawyer admits as much. So I guess the take away is on your last day of work, don't just zip up and ftp any code from your company, it's just not worth it. Actually I think the real takeaway is that if you are really good at your job, your company will pay more attention to you, especially when you leave. Sergey was a big part of the HFT team at Goldman, he literally rebuilt their infrastructure and his leaving was a huge deal to the team, and he wasn't just leaving to go to say Google, he was going to a new HFT outfit that would compete with Goldman. His actions would be like Mark Lucovsky leaving Microsoft with some windows NT kernel code he wrote, or Jeff Dean leaving Google with parts of the deep learning code to go to competitors to work on the same thing. I'd be willing to bet that both google and Microsoft would get lawyers involved in both those cases. If you want to make open source contributions while at work join a company like, um...., Microsoft? EDIT toned down the language calling him the entire HFT talent at Goldman, it was a bit over the top:)
- e40 12y ago
  So I guess the take away is on your last day of work, don't just zip up and ftp any code from your company, it's just not worth it. Not just "not worth it" but actually illegal. The only question of debate here is whether jail time was warranted here.
  - 15155 12y ago
    Sometimes illegal can be worth it.
  - miralabs 12y ago
    I was actually shocked to find out that there are actually a few programmers that does this. I don't know what is the reason but it is tantamount to stealing.
- iaw 12y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out. I wasn't aware that his original narrative was inaccurate, him having taken proprietary source code that he developed makes this outcome substantially more tolerable.
- revelation 12y ago
  The problem here isn't so much with the facts, it's with the prosecutors and polices eagerness in pursuing it. They only mention it in passing, but the reason he got all that evidence thrown out was essentially that the police were acting on very little else than Goldmans assertion. Then he got acquitted on what was if you want to a "legal loophole", but still (and even that only happened a few steps up on the jurisdictional ladder, even though the law clearly didn't apply to him). And then they charged him again, with essentially the same crime. So the same people that can't manage to put a single Goldman dude behind bars are all too happy to destroy lives on Goldmans words.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. Your comment starts by saying the problem isn't with the facts --- tacitly agreeing with 'chollida1 that wrongdoing was established --- but ends with the assertion that Aleynikov was convicted "on Goldman's words". Can you help me understand how both of those things can be true?
    - shabda 12y ago
      Not the OP, but I read his comment as frustration with "One law for rich, another for the poor". One can agree that Aleynikov should be convicted, but hope that the law should pursue people who play fast and lose with public money with the same zeal they shown here.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        Sure. But perhaps some of that frustration should be directed at legislatures that are too afraid of disrupting the economy and being blamed for job loss to criminalize the shady stuff giant banks do? Because one reason there's "one law" for people like Aleynikov and another for bank execs is that theft is black-letter illegal, and whatever-it-is we want to blame GS for might not be, yet. One bias prosecutors definitely have is taking cases they think they can win.
        12y ago
- murbard2 12y ago
  Sorry but no matter how good he was, it's ridiculous to say he was the entire talent. I'm in a good position to know: I worked for several years within the group he was a part of (right after he left) and there were tons of terrific people there.
  - monsterix 12y ago
    It's far more ridiculous to threaten and abuse our abject criminal system to reign in (that is if we assume the theft and not OSS happened) a talented employee who decided to jump the boat and join competition. Make no mistake, the people (wish their names were commonplace!) spearheading the legal pursuit on behalf of Goldman Sachs are evil - of the Hollywood/MPAA kind. Be wary of joining such Corporations, especially if you're a creative developer. What do you have to say to that?
    - tptacek 12y ago
      He wasn't convicted for violating a noncompete. He was convicted for taking Goldman property on his way out the door. His own lawyer stipulated to that in his summation.
- bravo22 12y ago
  I don't think it is well established that we he took was an algorithm or any such thing. Michael Lewis wrote a big article in Vanity Fair which I suggest you look at. He gathered a number of experts who looked at the evidence presented at his federal trial and concluded that what he took was modified open source code to run the queues, do messaging, etc. Boiler plate code to create the infrastructure. This is what GS is calling "proprietary source code", since he made the changes on GS dime therefore it is proprietary to them.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    That's a common misunderstanding. According to the Second Circuit: In addition to proprietary source code, Aleynikov also transferred some open source software licensed for use by the public that was mixed in with Goldman’s proprietary code. However, a substantially greater number of the uploaded files contained proprietary code than had open source software.
    - bravo22 11y ago
      The Second Circuit is not an expert on software. It is an expert in law and modified open source code becomes proprietary code in eyes of the law for the purposes of GS employment agreement. They're not parsing how GPL or some other license might have applied. I encourage you to look at Michael Lewis's article[1]. This passage is relevant: "As Goldman hadn’t permitted him to release his debugged or improved code back to the public—possibly in violation of the original free licenses, which often stated that improvements must be publicly shared—the only way to get his hands on these was to take the Goldman code. That he had taken, in the bargain, some code that wasn’t open source, which happened to be contained in the same files as the open-source code, surprised no one. Grabbing a bunch of files that contained both open-source and non-open-source code was an efficient, quick, and dirty way to collect the open-source code, even if the open-source code was the only part that interested him." [1] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...
      - tptacek 11y ago
fweespeech 12y ago
Does anyone feel like the Ex-Goldman Programmer did something shady/questionable ethically but nothing that should be considered illegal?
- cwyers 12y ago
  > Does anyone feel like the Ex-Goldman Programmer did something shady/questionable ethically Like working for Goldman Sachs?
  - rifung 12y ago
    Please excuse my ignorance but why is working for Goldman Sachs shady?
    - rmxt 12y ago
      I am not sure if this is what the GP is basing that opinion on, but there is quite a long list of controversies associated with GS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies Among the HN crowd I am sure you will find people on both sides of this issue: some people will think that GS is not working on 'good' problems that better the world, therefore, it is 'shady' to work there; and others will argue that GS is abstractly bettering the world through efficient resource/money allocation, especially for developing countries.
      - tormeh 12y ago
        >others will argue that GS is abstractly bettering the world through efficient resource/money allocation, especially for developing countries This would be true if GS didn't scam people, which they do. I accept the investment allocation argument, but I'm not convinced that it's valid for GS specifically. EDIT: Holy shit, that controversies section just goes on and on. I just checked, and it's 7000 words long. This company's insane.
        cheepin 12y ago
rada 12y ago
I am quite grossed out by the racist and misogynist media coverage of the "missing avocado" incident. Every single article about the case makes sure to mention that it was a female juror against a male juror and some of the articles also point out that the accuser is asian while the accused is white. How are these factoids relevant to the incident, or the larger case?
lordnacho 12y ago
This is totally ridiculous. The man is a veteran software architect. When you're a veteran software architect, you don't NEED the source code. The only thing it tells you is a few syntactical idiosyncrasies of whatever language/framework you happened to implement it in, and it saves you time in typing it out. Ask anyone who is familiar with GS's code base whether they would rather start fresh or have GS's code base. I've done this, and you can tell from my tone what they said. I've also been on the other side of such a case; someone copied some code I'd written. Guess what, they couldn't get it to work because they didn't understand how it worked. I suspect the jury is composed of people who are easily talked into a "cooking recipe" view of how software works. Well, just as I'm not going to be a Michelin chef from copying a recipe, you are also not going to know how to design an HFT system if you don't have a deeper understanding of how it works. Or maybe more to the point: there are plenty of people who copy recipes and make tasty food (my parents are quite good at this, actually). They don't get paid what a Michelin chef gets paid, because a Michelin chef is not a guy who just mixes some ingredients according to a formula.
- mfisher87 12y ago
  >Ask anyone who is familiar with GS's code base whether they would rather start fresh or have GS's code base. I've done this, and you can tell from my tone what they said. I think that's a false dichotomy -- no one can remember every minute detail of every problem solved by a large application. To re-do the research would be a large commitment, hence I'm convinced the wisest choice would be "both," legality aside.
- rubiquity 12y ago
  If we use your logic that it's hard to use other people's code, then the entire premise of open source is a failure. Clearly that isn't the case so I question your logic.
  - nulltype 12y ago
    Clearly.
- tedunangst 12y ago
discardorama 12y ago
The fact that the Manhattan DA's office spent so much effort pursuing this case goes to show how much power GS has over there. They are trying to make an example out of him. The state is literally doing GS's bidding here. Such a shame.
- choppaface 12y ago
  Agreed. While it's important for law enforcement to step up to new and technically challenging cases, the public would have been much better served had the DA focused on the Dewey & LeBoeuf case (as the NY Times suggests). This case had small marginal negative impact on society (and the leaking of HFT technology might even result in a positive for investors). Dewey & LeBoeuf are outright accounting fraudsters. Great story: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/14/the-collapse-2 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/14/the-collapse-2
boh 12y ago
"The prospect of a mistrial stemmed from a dispute between two jurors deciding Mr. Aleynikov’s fate, with a female juror accusing a male one of “food tampering” — in part because an avocado was missing from her sandwich." The justice system in action.
fenollp 12y ago
The only way Sergey "stole" code was by pushing open source code back to upstream..
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  This has been discussed over and over, but organisations aren't required to release GPL code that never leaves their servers. GPL code belongs to the organisation and the organisation alone if hired programmers work on it on behalf of the organisation. The programmer in question did not own the code, GS did. By releasing the code, he's stealing from them. End of story. Source - I've actually read the whole GPL licence.
  - alnsn 12y ago
    Indeed, it has been discussed many times. But I don't remember any discussion on attribution rights. If GS replaced GPL text with their own header they presumably deleted names of the original authors. I wonder if those authors could (collectively perhaps) send a complaint to GS and ask to restore the attributions?
  - fragmede 11y ago
    To be pedantic, the GPL doesn't actually say anything about the contract between an employer and employee. While I highly doubt the Goldman Sachs employment contract is anything other than work-for-hire, meaning you're still right, it's not impossible for a programmer to retain copyright of code they write (eg, any code you write on your own time on a computer you own).
erikpukinskis 12y ago
Steal from your employer: you're in trouble. Steal from your clients or the taxpayers: take slightly less profits for the quarter.

88 points by takinola 12y ago

From the article: > Mr. Marino did not challenge the underlying facts of the case. Instead, he said they added up not to a crime but to a simple breach of Goldman’s confidentiality policy. > “There’s no doubt Mr. Aleynikov did something wrong,” he told the jury, stopping occasionally to sip from a water bottle he clutched to throughout the closing statement. “But this is a very badly misguided case.” There has been a lot of misinformation surrounding this case. I think its well established now that Sergey Aleynikov did indeed take more source code than just his open source contributions with him, his lawyer admits as much. So I guess the take away is on your last day of work, don't just zip up and ftp any code from your company, it's just not worth it. Actually I think the real takeaway is that if you are really good at your job, your company will pay more attention to you, especially when you leave. Sergey was a big part of the HFT team at Goldman, he literally rebuilt their infrastructure and his leaving was a huge deal to the team, and he wasn't just leaving to go to say Google, he was going to a new HFT outfit that would compete with Goldman. His actions would be like Mark Lucovsky leaving Microsoft with some windows NT kernel code he wrote, or Jeff Dean leaving Google with parts of the deep learning code to go to competitors to work on the same thing. I'd be willing to bet that both google and Microsoft would get lawyers involved in both those cases. If you want to make open source contributions while at work join a company like, um...., Microsoft? EDIT toned down the language calling him the entire HFT talent at Goldman, it was a bit over the top:)

e40 12y ago
So I guess the take away is on your last day of work, don't just zip up and ftp any code from your company, it's just not worth it. Not just "not worth it" but actually illegal. The only question of debate here is whether jail time was warranted here.
- 15155 12y ago
  Sometimes illegal can be worth it.
- miralabs 12y ago
  I was actually shocked to find out that there are actually a few programmers that does this. I don't know what is the reason but it is tantamount to stealing.
iaw 12y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. I wasn't aware that his original narrative was inaccurate, him having taken proprietary source code that he developed makes this outcome substantially more tolerable.
revelation 12y ago
The problem here isn't so much with the facts, it's with the prosecutors and polices eagerness in pursuing it. They only mention it in passing, but the reason he got all that evidence thrown out was essentially that the police were acting on very little else than Goldmans assertion. Then he got acquitted on what was if you want to a "legal loophole", but still (and even that only happened a few steps up on the jurisdictional ladder, even though the law clearly didn't apply to him). And then they charged him again, with essentially the same crime. So the same people that can't manage to put a single Goldman dude behind bars are all too happy to destroy lives on Goldmans words.
- tptacek 12y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. Your comment starts by saying the problem isn't with the facts --- tacitly agreeing with 'chollida1 that wrongdoing was established --- but ends with the assertion that Aleynikov was convicted "on Goldman's words". Can you help me understand how both of those things can be true?
  - shabda 12y ago
    Not the OP, but I read his comment as frustration with "One law for rich, another for the poor". One can agree that Aleynikov should be convicted, but hope that the law should pursue people who play fast and lose with public money with the same zeal they shown here.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Sure. But perhaps some of that frustration should be directed at legislatures that are too afraid of disrupting the economy and being blamed for job loss to criminalize the shady stuff giant banks do? Because one reason there's "one law" for people like Aleynikov and another for bank execs is that theft is black-letter illegal, and whatever-it-is we want to blame GS for might not be, yet. One bias prosecutors definitely have is taking cases they think they can win.
      - 12y ago
murbard2 12y ago
Sorry but no matter how good he was, it's ridiculous to say he was the entire talent. I'm in a good position to know: I worked for several years within the group he was a part of (right after he left) and there were tons of terrific people there.
- monsterix 12y ago
  It's far more ridiculous to threaten and abuse our abject criminal system to reign in (that is if we assume the theft and not OSS happened) a talented employee who decided to jump the boat and join competition. Make no mistake, the people (wish their names were commonplace!) spearheading the legal pursuit on behalf of Goldman Sachs are evil - of the Hollywood/MPAA kind. Be wary of joining such Corporations, especially if you're a creative developer. What do you have to say to that?
  - tptacek 12y ago
    He wasn't convicted for violating a noncompete. He was convicted for taking Goldman property on his way out the door. His own lawyer stipulated to that in his summation.
bravo22 12y ago
I don't think it is well established that we he took was an algorithm or any such thing. Michael Lewis wrote a big article in Vanity Fair which I suggest you look at. He gathered a number of experts who looked at the evidence presented at his federal trial and concluded that what he took was modified open source code to run the queues, do messaging, etc. Boiler plate code to create the infrastructure. This is what GS is calling "proprietary source code", since he made the changes on GS dime therefore it is proprietary to them.
- tptacek 12y ago
  That's a common misunderstanding. According to the Second Circuit: In addition to proprietary source code, Aleynikov also transferred some open source software licensed for use by the public that was mixed in with Goldman’s proprietary code. However, a substantially greater number of the uploaded files contained proprietary code than had open source software.
  - bravo22 11y ago
    The Second Circuit is not an expert on software. It is an expert in law and modified open source code becomes proprietary code in eyes of the law for the purposes of GS employment agreement. They're not parsing how GPL or some other license might have applied. I encourage you to look at Michael Lewis's article[1]. This passage is relevant: "As Goldman hadn’t permitted him to release his debugged or improved code back to the public—possibly in violation of the original free licenses, which often stated that improvements must be publicly shared—the only way to get his hands on these was to take the Goldman code. That he had taken, in the bargain, some code that wasn’t open source, which happened to be contained in the same files as the open-source code, surprised no one. Grabbing a bunch of files that contained both open-source and non-open-source code was an efficient, quick, and dirty way to collect the open-source code, even if the open-source code was the only part that interested him." [1] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...
    - tptacek 11y ago

fweespeech 12y ago

Does anyone feel like the Ex-Goldman Programmer did something shady/questionable ethically but nothing that should be considered illegal?

cwyers 12y ago
> Does anyone feel like the Ex-Goldman Programmer did something shady/questionable ethically Like working for Goldman Sachs?
- rifung 12y ago
  Please excuse my ignorance but why is working for Goldman Sachs shady?
  - rmxt 12y ago
    I am not sure if this is what the GP is basing that opinion on, but there is quite a long list of controversies associated with GS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies Among the HN crowd I am sure you will find people on both sides of this issue: some people will think that GS is not working on 'good' problems that better the world, therefore, it is 'shady' to work there; and others will argue that GS is abstractly bettering the world through efficient resource/money allocation, especially for developing countries.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      >others will argue that GS is abstractly bettering the world through efficient resource/money allocation, especially for developing countries This would be true if GS didn't scam people, which they do. I accept the investment allocation argument, but I'm not convinced that it's valid for GS specifically. EDIT: Holy shit, that controversies section just goes on and on. I just checked, and it's 7000 words long. This company's insane.
      - cheepin 12y ago

rada 12y ago

I am quite grossed out by the racist and misogynist media coverage of the "missing avocado" incident. Every single article about the case makes sure to mention that it was a female juror against a male juror and some of the articles also point out that the accuser is asian while the accused is white. How are these factoids relevant to the incident, or the larger case?

lordnacho 12y ago

This is totally ridiculous. The man is a veteran software architect. When you're a veteran software architect, you don't NEED the source code. The only thing it tells you is a few syntactical idiosyncrasies of whatever language/framework you happened to implement it in, and it saves you time in typing it out. Ask anyone who is familiar with GS's code base whether they would rather start fresh or have GS's code base. I've done this, and you can tell from my tone what they said. I've also been on the other side of such a case; someone copied some code I'd written. Guess what, they couldn't get it to work because they didn't understand how it worked. I suspect the jury is composed of people who are easily talked into a "cooking recipe" view of how software works. Well, just as I'm not going to be a Michelin chef from copying a recipe, you are also not going to know how to design an HFT system if you don't have a deeper understanding of how it works. Or maybe more to the point: there are plenty of people who copy recipes and make tasty food (my parents are quite good at this, actually). They don't get paid what a Michelin chef gets paid, because a Michelin chef is not a guy who just mixes some ingredients according to a formula.

mfisher87 12y ago
>Ask anyone who is familiar with GS's code base whether they would rather start fresh or have GS's code base. I've done this, and you can tell from my tone what they said. I think that's a false dichotomy -- no one can remember every minute detail of every problem solved by a large application. To re-do the research would be a large commitment, hence I'm convinced the wisest choice would be "both," legality aside.
rubiquity 12y ago
If we use your logic that it's hard to use other people's code, then the entire premise of open source is a failure. Clearly that isn't the case so I question your logic.
- nulltype 12y ago
  Clearly.
tedunangst 12y ago

discardorama 12y ago

The fact that the Manhattan DA's office spent so much effort pursuing this case goes to show how much power GS has over there. They are trying to make an example out of him. The state is literally doing GS's bidding here. Such a shame.

choppaface 12y ago
Agreed. While it's important for law enforcement to step up to new and technically challenging cases, the public would have been much better served had the DA focused on the Dewey & LeBoeuf case (as the NY Times suggests). This case had small marginal negative impact on society (and the leaking of HFT technology might even result in a positive for investors). Dewey & LeBoeuf are outright accounting fraudsters. Great story: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/14/the-collapse-2 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/14/the-collapse-2

boh 12y ago

"The prospect of a mistrial stemmed from a dispute between two jurors deciding Mr. Aleynikov’s fate, with a female juror accusing a male one of “food tampering” — in part because an avocado was missing from her sandwich." The justice system in action.

fenollp 12y ago

The only way Sergey "stole" code was by pushing open source code back to upstream..

Mikeb85 12y ago
This has been discussed over and over, but organisations aren't required to release GPL code that never leaves their servers. GPL code belongs to the organisation and the organisation alone if hired programmers work on it on behalf of the organisation. The programmer in question did not own the code, GS did. By releasing the code, he's stealing from them. End of story. Source - I've actually read the whole GPL licence.
- alnsn 12y ago
  Indeed, it has been discussed many times. But I don't remember any discussion on attribution rights. If GS replaced GPL text with their own header they presumably deleted names of the original authors. I wonder if those authors could (collectively perhaps) send a complaint to GS and ask to restore the attributions?
- fragmede 11y ago
  To be pedantic, the GPL doesn't actually say anything about the contract between an employer and employee. While I highly doubt the Goldman Sachs employment contract is anything other than work-for-hire, meaning you're still right, it's not impossible for a programmer to retain copyright of code they write (eg, any code you write on your own time on a computer you own).

erikpukinskis 12y ago

Steal from your employer: you're in trouble. Steal from your clients or the taxpayers: take slightly less profits for the quarter.