No way. You sign away any rights to anything you come up with. You get the lecture on it. This guy Serge got shut down when he wanted to open source something. (although GS has open sourced some simple and non-strategic stuff, as a presumable PR move)
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.
whatever he or anyone at Goldman did on that open-source code, belongs to Goldman, and he can't assign the rights of or share it, either, it's up to Goldman (and the terms of the license).
> it's up to Goldman (and the terms of the license).
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.
what common open source licenses would require them to send changes upstream? Or really, what licenses would require them to release the modified code to the public?
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.
> 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.
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.
Sorry to spread FUD, I was under the impression that non-OSI compliant licenses sometimes made this requirement, but I can't find any actual examples so maybe it was an overly cautious question I was always answering 'no' to to get import approval.
Even if such a license existed, it's still the responsibility of the derivative code's owner to comply. If they refuse, then they can be sued, but their code can only be released under the license by their deliberate action.
The Netscape Public License is the only one I'm aware of. But it's not OSI-compliant (and thus, to most people, not open source) and I'm not aware of anyone still using it.
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.