One thing about this case puzzles me, and none of the news coverage I found explains it: what code did he actually take?! Details matter. Was it a tweak of something like Samba (obviously GPL)? Or was it part of a proprietary risk management system, derivatives models, or other direct money-making programs?
If he took the former, then I'd side with him — he took nothing of genuine value. If he took the latter, then, très uncool. (I witnessed several incidents of model theft while serving time on Wall Street in the mid-2000s, and none were publicly pursued like this one.)
In Flash Boys, he makes it clear that he did not take any trading strategies or in-house models.
They don't provide a ton of detail in the book, but it seems that he wanted to take some FOSS code he modified himself while at Goldman. All code ever used on a Goldman machine is licensed as proprietary, even if it was downloaded from a FOSS repository 1 µs beforehand. It's mentioned that some irrelevant infrastructure code may have been intermingled with the modified FOSS he took, though it doesn't seem Goldman was particularly incensed by any particular piece of code, simply by the fact that he took any to begin with.
Also in the book, Michael Lewis brings together a panel of HFT technologists to interview Sergey and assess whether anything he took was consequential. Their collective conclusion after meeting with him for several hours was that he took absolutely nothing of value.
By never distributing the result outside the company, and not caring about intermixing proprietary code with it? The GPL, like most other FOSS licenses, only applies to distribution; no distribution, no license compliance issues.
A comment elsewhere in the thread suggests that they put their own proprietary license header at the top. Which is legal if they never distribute the result.
The MIT license explicitly applies to those who obtain a copy of the code, not those who distribute it (although you are explicitly granted the right to distribute the code if you do obtain a copy of the code).
It also requires that all copies or substantial portions of the software maintain the copyright notice and the license text. If Goldman is just ripping off copyright notices and MIT licenses and slapping on their own copyright notice and license (or lack, thereof), they are doing it wrong. Way wrong (would not surprise anyone though).
>Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
>The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
>THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Not that simple. You can't just place your license above someone else's code even if you do not distribute externally, at a minimum you are going to distribute it internally. I'm not sure what legal avenues exist to prohibit this but this does not simply get a pass.
If it's permissively licensed, sure. But not just any license.
distribute it to whom? it was certainly distributed to the machines that are rented by a company which only assets is the fact it's close to the trading servers.
That is (generally) not how it works. HFTs rent rack space in which to insert machines that they themselves build, own, and maintain. The code never leaves the network/property of the company in usual circumstances.
In the book, Sergey says they simply rip the FOSS license off the header and replace it with a Goldman proprietary license. It's implied that the legality of this is a grey area.
Ripping software licenses of from software is extremely unlikely to be a grey area. The license is what gives a person permission, and if they remove it, so goes the permission. I would compare it to a person boarding a train, and then imminently throwing away the ticket.
What he took was proprietary infrastructure-related code that didn't involve any of Goldman's trading algorithms. His claim is that it was so tangled up with the open source code he wanted that he had to take it out to get it.
If he took the former, then I'd side with him — he took nothing of genuine value. If he took the latter, then, très uncool. (I witnessed several incidents of model theft while serving time on Wall Street in the mid-2000s, and none were publicly pursued like this one.)