I'm reposting one of the comments from the blog here for a bit more exposure. I think this gives a good alternative viewpoint on the case:<p>"I worked literally side by side with Serge while at Goldman Sachs, so I have substantial perspective on this. Let's be clear -- Goldman Sachs did not pursue him, the relevant district attorney of NY did. Goldman's job is not to prosecute, it is to provide the facts of the case to the judicial system, which decides whether to go after him or not. We can argue about whether the punishment was excessive but let's stop blaming a firm that is a private company which has no ability to prosecute. And I can tell you that what Serge did was incredibly against the terms of his employment agreement. The open source aspect is overblown, obviously if it were freely available and not substantially different he would have no need to upload it days before he left. The fact of the industry is people steal code all the time, he just happened to be one of the unfortunate programmers to be caught and made an example of. But it certainly doesn't mean he's a victim here. When a company is paying you 500k+ a year to write code on its time, the understanding is that they have the say as to what happens to it, not you. You can't just say, I don't think this is that materially different so I'm going to send it to myself before I work for a competitor."