In case people aren't clear on this. He worked in an industry that takes this sort of thing very seriously. He shouldn't have even been trying to download open source from work. You don't email stuff home to work on it, for example.
Now, was Goldman reasonable here? No, we can probably all agree that Goldman and the government overstepped a lot of bounds chasing this guy down. That said, I don't think some form of prosecution was unreasonable.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
Given that GS is a multi-billion global behemoth which runs a bewildering array of computerized services with an even larger array of customers, I'd be pretty shocked if they didn't have some API or client functionality which would trigger the AGPL if they included AGPL'd code in it.
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.
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?
Secondly: Being fired is not what happened to this guy. He was prosecuted and sent to prison. Not even remotely the same thing.
Being sentenced to 8 years in prison based on wildly ill-informed testimony is clearly not a reasonable response.
Unfortunately, engineers fail to account for the fact that image and credibility matter far more than substance. This is a case of a man who really had no intention to do anything wrong, but almost certainly did break the law in a pattern that's a notorious bugbear in finance.
I could see theft of property, possibly, but the furthest I could see it going is breaking an employment agreement, which is a contract between two private parties and doesn't bring criminal charges for violations.
the The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (as amended 1994 and 1996) seem to indicate that financial institutions are protected computers
"intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access" which this guy did.