Won't be a boon for OSS, any author would be idiotic to read stolen source code and then decide to create a OSS library/project based on what they learn from it.
Ah, but will it make its way into Copilot? That could be interesting.
The Copilot Defence
What? Why? Isn't this what software developers do — they read a lot of code; they find ideas they like; they mix them together with their own ideas while building something. Isn't this how learning works in general?
Not normally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here#In_computing
More to the point: an organisation will usually use cleanroom techniques to clone something like this, if they choose to do so. Anyone who's been in contact with the original source code is "polluted": https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Copyright_Issues
The whole point of the idea/expression dichotomy is that copyright doesn't protect ideas. To that end, extracting the uncopyrightable elements out of copyrightable code is more than legal and court-endorsed. Wine's approach just makes me sad, lots of wasted effort on black-box testing where a disssembly of the real code would be legally in the clear and allow it to advance at much better speeds.
This is naive. This generation seems very sensitive to the prospect of computer crime.
The stolen source code will almost certainly be read, and if deemed novel enough will be turned into open source projects. It may be tough to figure out those projects are derivatives of stolen code, but most likely they will be passed around in black market repos.
I looked through some of my telegram channels to see if anything has been posted yet. Lo and behold, the stolen files are in fact available… from a server in Ukraine.
You're right. I remember a time, maybe 20 years ago, when stuff like this would be generally appreciated by any community of hackers.
They do not have memories of a time when people tinkered around doing all kinds of crazy and possibly illegal stuff, just for fun, just to see if the could. Sad really.
What exactly did you expect the punishments to be like? A fine?
But re-licensing someone's else code is at the very least impolite. People avoid using BSD-licensed code in GPL code base, or vice versa, just to not violate an open-source license of some fellow hacker who won't sue (but would yawp on Twitter, or something).
Also, cutting proprietary stuff out of the thick scaffolding of proprietary dependencies is often hard. Removing proprietary cruft / tech debt may be even harder. A rewrite from scratch (not clean-room though) may be just easier.
This is to say nothing about any serious business unwilling to depend on code of unclear provenance, with possible legal complications attached; there goes adoption.
Huh? I don't believe they do that. It's completely fine to use BSD in GPL code, but not the other way around.
Binaries, yes -- either more or less restricted depending on which side of the ideological fence you're sitting on.
For some, sure.
There are also many who still explore, but qualitatively the overall culture feels very different.
Unfortunately, there are employers who seem to want their employees to tinker, but own virtually everything they do, all while still playing lip service to supporting work-life balance, including parenting. So we get mixed messages and weird hiring priorities.
I thought the same, then one day I stumbled onto a discord populated by teens and college students who were doing the same sort of shenanigans my friends and I were up to back in the day.
The S/N ratio is worse, but there are still people out there having fun!
Later, after studying engineering, I moved more into caring about problems and products. Over time, I found more and more companies wanted the benefits of having skilled software developers, but they seems to primarily want the businessified version -- solve the problem at hand while punting obvious existential problems down the road.
Sure, many Silicon Valley startups say they want "passionate" programmers, but they didn't usually embrace the tradeoffs that go along with it ... time and resources to explore, supporting risk taking, and fostering a culture where some experimentation is its own end (not merely a means).
Worse, these same companies that claimed to be business focused didn't even engineer well.
So often I saw a double failure: a lack of both the long-term exploration and tactical execution. Somehow both got lost.
There are exceptions of organizations that have healthy, adaptive cultures that internalize continual assessment and improvement, ranging across team interactions, software quality, user experience, and organizational processes.
Perhaps I was too naive and didn't fully appreciate the difficulty here; my progression in engineering has generally coincided with me lowering my expectations. I mean this as a trend line only; I have seen some impressive exceptions, but they tend to be unusual and fairly narrow in scope.
For example, the best product vision I've ever seen was coupled with a seemingly distracted CEO.
This is just one thread of my experience, I'm sure others have seen many other things. I for one would really enjoy reading reflections on working in the software industry.
For myself and perhaps other "passionate" programmers, learning to dial down "caring" and attempting to fit in with imperfect cultures is very hard. It would be one thing if the people in control seemed to understand the situation and showed empirically good results.
Not everyone has to share a political point of view, so while some people are anarchists and are happy to just have a giant free-for all others believe in the concept of ownership. That isn’t a lack of curiosity or a professional buttoned-up money-chasing approach.
More broadly speaking, I'd say that the cultural distinction between "hacker" and "corporate" was much wider then, and it manifested in this manner among others.
20 years ago you would get people lamenting that 20 years before that everything was all hippy sunshine and rainbows and homebrew computer club, phreaking and shareware etc, and that wasn't true then just like it isn't now.
I don't think anarchism has ever been the mainstream position at least never in my experience. It has always been present but always been fringe.
Origin will be forgotten and that will be that.
These days everyone whack code on GitHub I wonder if it'd be possible for GitHub to review repos for likely derivative of leaked code?
With the current geopolitical situation going on, is this really true? (From a western developer's perspective)
Would the US government cooperate in the indictment and prosecution of a US citizen, on behalf of a de-facto enemy nation, for a company that has ties and is allegedly controlled by the government of said nation?
Not isolated incidents, rather something suggestive that one could confidently bring a sympathy-based argument in deference of law and expect a high probability of succeeding.
Social consensus is the only reason that you can leave your car at the curb, and come back to it a week later, and still expect it to be yours. Social consensus is the only reason that you can own land that you don't personally use. Social consensus is the only thing that prevents people working at your widget factory from deciding on Tuesday that its actually their widget factory, and that they would be better off by cutting out the middleman.
There are very rare, very extreme situations in which this kind of social consensus is very prominently broken.