The other day Goldman Sachs was at my college campus trying to recruit computer programmers. As the recruiters described how wonderful it is to work for Goldman Sachs, I couldn't help but recall an article I read about how Goldman Sachs prosecuted a former employee, Sergey Aleynikov, for stealing intellectual property. I don't know all the details of the case, but essentially, Aleynikov was trying to do what was right and legally required by open source software licenses and contribute code that he created back to the open source community. I would never work for a company like Goldman Sachs, because I believe that open-source is a good thing and ought to be promoted, not discouraged.
You can check out some of these articles for more information about the trial: Vanity Fair, Above the Law, Forbes
It is interesting that a company such as Goldman Sachs wouldn't train their employees not to use such open-source restrictive code. Or it could have been one of the ridiculous number of trainings that no one cares to pay attention to, because there are so many rules.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that open-source is a great idea and should be promoted. I would like to point out though that it seems like almost every large company in this country has a similar policy: that if the code was written for the company, it cannot be used anywhere else. I don't agree with this policy, but that's just how it seems to work in our country.
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