
Maybe the guy...
... Had all the company code on his home PC to work on it - all of us are working from home, right? Right?
Regardless of the fact that he is guilty or not, I can bet Goldman Sachs will pay anyway.
A former programmer for banking firm Goldman Sachs who has been accused of stealing company secrets has filed suit against the FBI agents who arrested him for allegedly violating his constitutional rights. Sergey Aleynikov, 45, has been battling it out in the courts ever since his 2009 arrest on charges that he absconded with …
This sounds trumped up to me too -- you know, the modern day "lets find the most impressive-sounding charge, and if that doesn't work firehose on more charges" approach. I don't support ripping off code, even from Goldman Sachs, but I do think when a judge sees treatment like this they should simply drop all charges and chastize the prosecutors for this behavior. Unlawful use of scientific material? Sounds like a crock of shit to me. If they had filed a more normal charge than an "economic espionage act" charge, and followed proper procedure handling the evidence, I bet it would have stuck.
"A former programmer for banking firm Goldman Sachs who has been accused of stealing company secrets has filed suit against the FBI agents who arrested him for allegedly violating his constitutional rights."
He was arrested because he violated his own constitutional rights...?
Punctuation, the difference between "Helping your uncle, Jack, off a horse" and Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"!
Let this be successful.
Anything that helps put a stop to the toxic implementation of the US justice system. It is disgusting the way authorities attempt to send every infringement down for life by just piling on any charge at random and seeing what sticks.
(Yet another example that the US is infact a 3rd world dictatorship, masquerading as a civilised society)
Michael Lewis's nonfiction work Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt details his — and other's — story in the effort to move what we'll inaccurately call Wall Street back to serving the customers and not the brokerages.
A good stop if one wants to get educated before opining.
Not that, obviously, any one has to.
The appeal seems to have succeeded because the laws applied for the charge covered the theft of a product, and his lawyers argued in court that the law's definition of a product did not cover code. This does not mean Aleynikov did not actually take code from Goldman Sachs that the company thought was their intellectual property. Indeed, Aleynikov acknowledged downloading some source code from Goldman Sachs systems, he just claims he did so when looking for open source code (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov#Arrest.2C_trial_and_acquittal). So, IMHO, it does look reasonably suspicious that he tried to take code he should not have from Goldman Sachs with the probable intent of using it for his or a competitor's benefit. Which sounds like textbook industrial espionage to me. After his successful appeal, the law in question was tightened up to cover code (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H18DE2-0051:).
Some of the posters here seem driven by a distaste for Wall Street into thinking it is just some "bank-driven vendetta". In the UK, having worked with financial institutions and signed many a NDA, I can assure you his downloading of proprietary code - even if he was the coder that wrote it for an UK bank - would have got him in hot water legally too over here and in most of Europe (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b7fb43ae-57af-11e3-86d1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3RpYFvtAe). That the Feds and New York are keen to protect the financial institutions that make a lot of tax dollars is hardly surprising, so Mr Aleynikov is going to have the book plus a ton of bricks thrown at him with gusto.
How is that possible? Surely there are only a finite number of ways you can arrange programming commands. Some of which will compile and work as applications.
It is possible for two or more people to independently write the same app. There are only so many ways certain things can be done.
Just like in literature all the core stories have probably already been written. Everything new is just a variation of what has come before.
To me software development is just a race to see who can figure out in which order the syntax needs to be to get the desired result then arrange the commands the quickest.
I fell out of love with software devs the day some of them started using "I dont understand backend stuff" as an excuse for crap code...especially in relation to SQL.
I dont do software dev but im finding myself wading into that world more often.
As Bonnie Tyler would probably say "where have all the good devs gone?".
/troll