
Steal This Code - finally some common sense - bitdiddle
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/opinion/17osinski.html?ref=opinion
======
Tarks
<http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/> \- A little background on the author
for anyone interested. Really good read.

------
brown9-2
The premise of the author's argument seems to be "don't worry, the programmer
won't do anything bad with the code". I don't think it's such a good idea to
just implicitly trust that an employee who downloads your source code isn't
going to do something unethical with it.

(especially in an environment in which the owner of that code, i.e. Goldman,
has already taken great pains to prevent copying of the source code, such as
removing physical access to the PCs, etc)

Goldman has to protect their shareholders in this kind of thing, and there
really isn't any room for "let's just trust this guy won't do anything harmful
to us" in that.

------
mildweed
How much copied code constitutes theft these days? Arguably, a system may
hinge on one to ten crucial calculations or routines, despite the many, many
lines of code to make sense of that data and then present it to the user. Does
copying those crucial algorithms constitute theft while copying the same
quantity of procedural fluff not? I suspect there are some very grey lines in
the precedential cases leading up to now. Does anybody know definitively?

------
danohuiginn
best line:

"Michael Osinski, a former computer programmer, is an oyster farmer."

~~~
mahmud
Been to a live gig recently? I met more systems programmers backing up a
vocalist on some instrument than anywhere else. The most recent one was a
local fellow yank here in Sydney, he plays jazz for a living; this guy
introduced C++ to MCI/LDDS/Worldcom back when it was a macro-processor, and he
was their in-house compiler geek (btw, geeky bar talk with strangers has a
peculiar taste to it; register allocation strategies over beer ftw! :-)

I also met a former Atari dude who now runs his own bar in Thailand.

------
mseebach
Why is he so angry with Goldman Sachs? The firms survival of the crisis
appears to indicate that they did not take excessive risks out of greed, and
thus are not directly complicit?

Hmm, come to think about it, it reads a bit like anyone in finance is a greedy
bastard who deserves bad things to happen to him.

BTW, same guy as in this story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538849>
.. good read.

------
viggity
If I were Goldman, I wouldn't be worried that he would build a better version
of my software. What I would be worried about is that he would analyze it,
find holes in the methodology and figure out a way to screw me on my trades
that are made with this software. Either by beating me to the punch, OR trying
to game the market is such a way that my software would make a trade that is
not advantageous to me.

~~~
emontero1
Although, one could also make the case that he already had access to the code
before his departure as part of his daily responsibilities. Therefore, the
fact that he was leaving had no real implications in him knowing the innards
of the application and its source code.

What I don't understand is why there's no word about an NDA between Goldman
and Mr Aleynikov. Had he been under contractual obligations, or bounded by a
noncompete clause, Mr Aleynikov wouldn't have been incentivized to extract
code from the repository to being with. It seems logical to me that if you're
dealing with coveted IP, a contract between the parties is a necessity rather
than a luxury.

