I hate to respond to this a second time, and AC, don’t take this as a response to what you said. I had time to think about this some more, and felt I should delve a little further here.

I responded with Goldman Sachs as an example to grandparent AC’s comment that he needed citations for great-grandparent AC’s comment about most IP maximalists being hypocrites. I was giving an example, which I still believe is an example of Goldman Sachs being a hypocrite. What Goldman Sachs did was legal, and I’d even argue, it was entirely ethical (based on the GPL.) But it doesn’t make them any less of a hypocrite because they could have clean room developed the code instead of just borrowing it from open-source.

RMS is a smart man, and he believes (unlike most Copyright Maximalists,) that Copyright only restricts the distribution of software. GPL is based on that belief. Copyright Maximalists argue, however, that copyright means they can restrict how the software (or other artwork) is used, hence you see things like DVD Region Encoding, EULAs, and the such. Goldman Sachs believes that their own programmer should not be allowed to keep a copy of the code he worked on for them.

Now I am making no excuses for Aleynikov, what he did was 100% unethical, and entirely wrong especially since his stated intent was to use the code to get a better job with a competitor. However, I see this as the ultimate result of an organization that doesn’t understand the implications of borrowing GPL, either without understanding what GPL means, or by taking the attitude that so long as they don’t distribute GPL code in their product, they are safe. They may be legally allowed to borrow the code, but they are still being hypocritical by getting upset with Aleynikov for borrowing their code. I could play the same game as the copyright maximalists and claim that unless Aleynikov was developing the software directly on the server, he did distribute the software (but RMS would rightly not agree with this statement, and neither would I.)

I’ve worked in several closed source software projects and all but one of them were hypocritical when it came to borrowing code (they would freely borrow from someone else, but would not return the favor)…I worked shortly for one boss who believed that any code which was published was fair game for use in his project. “If they didn’t want it copied, they shouldn’t have published it in the first place.” I didn’t want to have anything to do with him after he told me this…he didn’t want anyone else copying his code, but he’d freely copy anything that he came across.

On the other hand, I worked on a project where the project “got it.” All submitted code had to contain documentation on what sources were used to develop the code (including what tech manuals/SDK we used,) and if anything was taken from open source or from any other restricted license, it had to be a clean room development of the open source project, and the clean room process and all participants had to be documented, or the code was rejected. I left the project to move on to better things (open source projects,) and haven’t been back since.

I think the only way to develop closed source is to develop the way the second project did things. Certainly if the second project was sued for copyright infringement, they’d have an easy time in court. But they were also the only project that wasn’t hypocritical about their use of borrowed code, they even documented when they borrowed code from themselves for other projects they worked on. Part of the duty of choosing closed source is that you have to be extremely careful about where it is coming from…far less of a problem with open source since everyone can see the submissions and bad code is usually caught immediately, and you can borrow code from other open source projects usually without running afoul of their licenses.