Would that be a justified response? By the exact reading of the law/agreement probably not. But then again, this student was free to use the software at CERN, he just went out of his way to also work with it on his laptop (for the same project I suppose). That means the company is punishing someone for using their software, even though there was no lost sale. For me it feels unnecessary to put a 30k CHF fine on someone that way.
Essentially, this person could legally claim that CERN or one of it's employees requested he install the software, and to just download it if the normal process didn't work.
If as part of your job you violate commercial agreements (this includes copyright related infractions and licence violations), the company is responsible for any and all damages and contractual consequences of these action(s). Even if there is no contract involved, for example in the course of your job function, you drop a pallet onto someone's car, the company is responsible for the damages. They can, of course, fire you as a result of this mentioning something about "lack of proper judgement", but that's the limit of what they can do. They can also not withhold wages for any period the employee was under contract, no matter how much damage he caused.
There are exceptions which mostly relate to an employee signing contracts in the name of the company and criminal acts, but they don't seem to apply here (the company board must name and publish a list of people who are authorized to sign in the name of the company in a government registry. Anyone who signs an agreement with said company is responsible for comparing the signature of the contact with that list. If you fail to do this, the contract may be null and void) (also, this is assuming it was not a criminal act. But neither copyright law nor contract law falls under criminal law, so only copyright violations committed as part of your job cannot result in you losing more than your job)
This employee should immediately cease all communication with CERN relating to these damages, neither admit or deny anything at all and resolve the matter with the help of a labor lawyer. Ideally, he should continue to carry out his duties as specified in his employment contract, but NOT talk about this incident, instead requesting all communication relating to this happen through registered mail.
This strongly looks like CERN is trying to pull a fast one on an employee. CERN, not the employee, has to pay damages resulting from one of their employees violating a contract they signed.
Really? I could take a job with a software company, then purposefully pirate everything in sight, and the worst that could happen is I get fired? And the company has to pay the damages?
(Be right back, applying for an NSA job.)
Let's get building!
https://www.comsol.com/press/news/article/821/
"Another factor that was attractive was the fact that a single network license allows CERN to run a COMSOL job on any number of cores or a compute cluster."
And their "Floating Network License" allows use across an entire network, but not off that network: https://uk.comsol.com/products/licensing
[1] http://information-technology.web.cern.ch/services/software
EDIT: The proper way to handle this would've been to say "Hey! Your site license doesn't cover this. Please don't do it again, as we depend on that license revenue to pay our bills to write great software."
That's mostly the proper way to get people to not care and end up killing your business anyway.
> Someone that's selling proprietary software is
> acting like an ass, let's teach them a lesson.The naivete and total absence of awareness of how things work in the Real World in this thread make me shake my head. 'Hey all, someone should write an open source version!' - sure, and in the mean while, those same people gush over some guy raising 300k for "the next generation code editor" who then barely manages to build something that works at all, let alone is an actual improvement.
Software is hard and expensive, especially software that has actual domain knowledge embedded, unlike the 1000th 'micro js framework for single page apps' and fads like that. All the hate on people and companies who make a living selling software (gasp!) is... well, there is no other word for it - plain dumb.
(yes, I make (part of) my living from selling software)
> If it was truely the easy to replicate cash cow some seem to be assuming, there would be competition all over the place; or a lab would get some intern to replace it in 6 months.
Okay, now I have to ask. Do you have any experience with interns at a university trying to write even, let us assume, a relatively simple and straightforward piece of software?
Don't get me wrong, I partly agree with you, nobody's going to rewrite the high-end scientific software in a weekend.
But you seem to be saying that's because it's too hard. What I'm saying is that the people with the domain knowledge (physics students, interns, PHDs, whatnot, even the computational science guys) are pretty much uniformly shit at writing software. It's a big reason why there's not a lot of code sharing going on in the scientific community: Shame. And that if it was published nobody would want to read it, and there's a rather big chance it would reveal fundamental research errors.
The real reason this "high end" scientific software is guarded so heavily is because the fact that they have other users than themselves, they know they are in possession of a unicorn.
Then there's the part where all the old professors have their (unreadable) scripts written for that ancient unicorn, so even if something better comes along, nothing's going to change much. And even if the students translate (read: completely rewrite and fix some longstanding bugs) those scripts to the modern software, the professors won't have anything to do with it because they don't want to learn the newer thing since they spent so much effort getting to know the arcane old thing (though they will claim they don't trust the new software yet).
Dinosaurs. People will wax nostalgic over having worked at (gasp) actual UNIX terminals in their university years. Except it was the year 1999 and you had to FTP to the one machine with a floppy drive to take your stuff home. Sorry I digress, but yaaaaay science.
I am not a lawyer.
They could try. I've seen HUGE fusses being thrown over way more reasonable refusals than this.
Submission tends to be covered by laws as well.
Now, we're more using "her" for "person of unspecified/unknown gender", but the problem remains: We've got three states (male, female, and unknown/unspecified), and only two words (him and her). No matter what, there's going to be this kind of problem, until we come up with a third word. (People have suggested "they" or "them", but I don't like it because of singular/plural issues.)
The story refers to the article, the student, in the masculine form. In English, we do not have explicit masculine/feminine forms of adjectives, therefore the article, in this case a student, is a male as the story's author referred to the article as 'him', 'he' and 'his'. I simply do not understand what you are finding so hard about this, other than petty political correctness. QED.
Furthermore, it is totally irrelevant to the story itself!
You. Are. Wrong.
That's one of the ways people use "him". Other times, they use "him" to mean that the individual in question is male.
These days, "her" to combat the implicit assumption that people must be male is common enough, it's almost safer to assume that "him" means someone who is specifically male.
I think this is not true yet. Anecdotally I personally only noticed this first a few months ago and no one I've discussed it with in real life has yet known what I'm talking about.