Slashdot Mirror
Affinity Engines Says Google Stole Orkut Code
GillBates0 writes "Wired's reporting that a social networking software company called Affinity Engines has filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that much of the source code behind Orkut, the search engine's popular social service, was stolen by former engineer Orkut Buyukkokten. They claim that he illegally took the code the he had written for the company -- which he co-founded -- with him when he joined Google and that Buyukkokten promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn't develop a competing social network service for Google. '"In its initial investigation, AEI uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs ... in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in Orkut.com," according to the lawsuit.'"
wait...isn't this the only value of closed source? that piracy doesn't happen?
For its part, Google is shrugged off Affinity Engines' allegations.
... thoroughly and concluded that the allegations are without merit."
"Affinity Engines has not provided any evidence to Google that their source code was used in the development of Orkut.com," wrote David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, in a statement to Wired News. "We have repeatedly offered to allow a neutral expert to compare the codes in the two programs and evaluate Affinity's claims, but Affinity has rejected that offer. We have investigated the claims
I want to know why Orkut is rejecting the netural expert. It doesn't exactly make their claims look valid when they do that. Are they learning from SCO here? Perhaps if we make shit up and don't let anyone examine the claims thoroughly we can defame Company X and get money from them!
Ahh, when History repeats itself...
Maybe it's true. Neatly dismissing the accuser because the defendant is Google seems foolish to me.
If we want unbiased courts, the first thing to do is become unbiased ourselves.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I don't know too many software engineers that don't keep at least a library of souce code from one development job to another, regardless of the "rules". However, it seems really bold to me to say your not going to create a competing service and then create one that is named after you.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
> Ironically, it ended up killing the
> company -- the developer wouldn't share the
> code with anyone and didn't have the skill
> set to make the sort of changes to it we
> needed. In the end, we had to try and build
> a new core from scratch, which just put
> us even farther behind.
Well said. I wonder how often this happens - a developer is hired in the hopes of bringing onboard magical knowledge, but it turns out to be more of an impediment than anything else.
Perhaps there are some domains that work better for this than others - maybe writing drivers, or algorithm-heavy applications. But it seems like most businesses would be better served by writing the code themselves so they understand what it does and how it got to where it is now.
The Army reading list
Because the employee isn't worth nearly as much money as the company is.
Did this Orkut guy sign an NDA or is there some sort of specific document that says he promised he wouldn't develop another social service?
It seems like a pretty weak case, and I agree with the parent, if the company should be going after anyone, it's the person who created the code. Google shouldn't be liable for someone ripping off or developing code based on work done for another company's engine unless Google knowingly did it; and I very highly doubt they would. Only of course they know they can't sue the person himself because there isn't any money in it - if nothing else they could be trying to pocket money from other competitors who want Google to lose, just like MS funded SCO.
If I needed to hire a hitman, I would try to get someone from Google to do the job. It seems that Google could get away with murder right now.
Well... They may not be liable to pay damages for their past use of the code, but the article kind of indicates that the infringing code is still in Google's current product. So, if the code was stolen they could get an injunction against google (I think this might be called cease and desist order in the US, but same difference) to force them to stop using it.
When people leave old jobs for new, it can be difficult to divide the ideas developed at one location from those at another, and if Google was acting in good faith, they shouldn't be forced to pay damages at least until they were put on notice of the infringement.
What Google presumably wants, however, is to avoid disruption to its services and reputation, so if there is merit to the accusation, expect some kind of out of court deal that avoids both parties being dragged through the courts.
What can't be settled out of court so easily would be if there is enough evidence against the developer for a criminal case.
Should just do what I started doing awhile back: Just read and enjoy /. and let others fight for the "priviledge" of having a story accepted. There are more worthwhile things to get upset about.
The likelihood that the error was made in the same way by two independent coders is unlikely (although it has happened before).
But we're not talking about independant coders here. We're talking about the same coder. Sometimes people can make the same mistake twice. My fiancee bought the same birthday card for her brother two years in a row (the really funny bit is that it took her half an hour to pick it out each time!!)
"In its initial investigation, AEI uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs ... in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in Orkut.com,"
Maybe Orkut didn't steal the code verbatim, maybe he's just a consitently crappy coder (but just in 9 specific situations).
Telling a developer, "we here at Affinity will miss you, enjoy your new job at Google...but by the way, never build social-circle-yadda-yadda software again because you already built something similar for us" is like telling an automotive designer, "you did great work here at Ford, especially when you designed the new Mustang. But in your new design job at GM, please don't design any sport coupes."Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
Personally, I'm pretty impressed with the slashdot crowd in regards to this article. I don't mean this to be a condescending attack on readers of slashdot or anything (which would obviously include myself...a registered user, for fuck's sake...) but moreso that I'm refreshed to see a challenge of intellectual property actually being taken seriously. Before reading any of the comments, I expected to see a whole ton of "...Here we go again, another SCO bidness model rears it's ugly head..." but instead I'm treated to some pretty funny comments regarding the fact that this Orkut fellow not only allegedly copied/stole code, but BUGGY code at that. Too rich...
In an age where too many companies are in fact taking the SCO litigation route to build an income stream, it's just nice to see that not all open source supporters/nerds initially take every single IP challenge as a platform for another string of nasty lawsuits. The only drawback, of course, is the potential for the courts to start adopting a boy who cries wolf mentality when observing IP cases, as we all know this kind of stuff happens all the time to people who've worked hard and end up getting the shaft. It's just a damn shame that as of late, larger organizations have made IP litigation out to be a fucking joke, and now real cases are more likely to get dismissed or brushed aside...
--
Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
Wow, that sounds secure, working for a startup whose "whole product line was based on a voice core that one of the developers had stolen from his previous employer". That is so wrong in so many ways. Brings to mind a t-shirt that said "We steal from the other guy and pass the savings on to you.".
This just gave me an idea. How do you compare two programs and figure out if one copied from the other? Simple inspection of the source isn't really good enough. Change some variable names and maybe a few structures, and it'll be pretty hard. After all, it's entirely possible for more than one person to solve the same problem the same way. If both programs work the same way, that doesn't really prove much.
;)
What if you go the other way though? What if you compare how both programs don't work. Take known defects from one program, and try them on the other. If the defect occurs in both programs, and the cause isn't something trivial like an off-by-one, you've got a much better clue that one program is a copy of the other. Heck, if you track your bugs well, you can probably figure out the exact version and even build that the other program was copied from. Bugs might almost be like fingerprints.
Anybody need a graduate thesis?
Happens all the time. You must be clean if you hire developers from the competition. Keep programming notebooks, write everything down, code from scratch. Nothing can be re-used.
Orkut always confused me as to why it was affiliated with Google. It's such a shoddy web application. Google is so awesome, and Orkut is mediocre at best. They should just drop it.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
If the guy was doing it in the course of his employment (and by the way Google endorses Orkut it can be assumed he was), then Google is in a difficult situation. Especially with the upcoming IPO. Of course, these are still allegations, nobody proved yet that the code is actually the same.
Please note, IANAL, and I'm not even trying to become one
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
That's awfully cynical, even if it is true. However, Google, as a company, is responsible for the conduct of its employees.
Well, the next time that an employee of a big company goes bonkers and shoots up a public place, let's remember to put the company on trial.
I think (IANAL) that Google could only be held responsible if they were found negligent (e.g. they had reason to believe that the source was stolen).
This is also why I use Subversion (used to use CVS) repositories even when I'm the only developer on a project. Regular commit cycles give you a dated trail for the development of code and you can show the evolution of code rather than the sudden arrival of entire functions and classes the are fully functional.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
While I don't know if Google will be found liable(e.g. have to pay money), if the allegations are true they would certainly have to stop using the code(or license it if they want).
Surely you wouldn't suggest that if an employee of a company stole a car and gave it to the company, that the company should be able to keep it?
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
This is rich. I'm going to start posting "Why is Microsoft in question? It should be the employee" the next time some new IE bug is reported, or some patent issue, etc.
I'll rack up the +5 Insightfuls!
Just to show how liability works...
My father is a plumber and was working for company X. Company X allowed him to use a company truck to take home (commute directly to jobs). One Saturday morning on his way to work, he had a medical problem (doctors were inconclusive if it was a heart attack, but they know something happened) that caused him to lose conciousness at the wheel. He went through a red light and killed a passenger in another vehicle. Now because he was in a company vehicle, the legal action was against company X rather than my father. Being that he was driving to a job site in the company vehicle, the company was liable. While financially I'm glad that my parents didn't have a direct cost to them (other than the legal side resulting in legal fees, probation, and court/probation cost), I don't believe it was really fair that the company bears the cost (insurance mostly, but still the rates are way up).
Being Orkut is acting as an agent of Google, unfortunately the company is liable. Logically though the blame should fall on the individual, but targeting the company and the individual seems to be the legal approach.
Drop "randomly" from your sentence and you'd be correct. Why reinvent the wheel?
Happens all the time. You must be clean if you hire developers from the competition. Keep programming notebooks, write everything down, code from scratch. Nothing can be re-used.
Spoken like someone that has never done any programming? All programmers develop libraries that they then reuse. A lot of programming is refactoring old code into more generic libraries so they can be reused more easily. Every programmer takes the knowledge they've gained onto their next job, it's the majority of their value. You just have to be careful, that's all.
Imagine if you can't reuse anything? You would have to invent a new sort routine for every company you join? Re-implement all your basic disc I/O? There are only so many ways of doing it, you'd run out of alternative implementations pretty quickly.
If you work for a company then they own the copyright to everything you write. If Google rips this off then it will be pretty easy to compare and if it's application specific code then it will be an easy court case. The reason companies have non-competition clauses is because once you've written something once then it's easy to rewrite from scratch something better having learned from your mistakes. If your employee hasn't signed such a clause then tough luck.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Ripping off code to get to market faster isn't stupid - when you don't get caught. Keeping an angelic image generates "goodwill", which generates faith in corporate actions, which helps corporate decisionmakers to avoid getting caught.
--
make install -not war
The company owns the copyright on the code your write for them under the legal concept of "works for hire". Unless they failed to pay you for it, they own it. You leaving the building, and letting someone else use it is a copyright violation. The employer you originally wrote it for should be able to successfully sue for copyright violation.
Now, I have plenty of ideas stuck in my head that I've ended up re-implementing in nearly exactly the same way at two different places. I can re-implement my C++ database independent access library in a little under two weeks. I can write the reference counting classes I like to use in a day. I can implement the interface wrapper classes in about 3-4 hours. I can write the socket stream libraries, and the various SSL varients in a day or two. I can write a simple logging scheme in about a day or two. They are written at different times. I can show them as they are constructed, and demonstrate that they are clean room implementations. So I should be in the clear according to what I've read and been advised about the law.
I ended up using the same names, and structuring the code the same way. Some one pointed out I might be breaking the NDA I signed at a former employer. So I ended up re-implementing it all again, this time going out and finding the functionality/API I wanted in publically accessable code (and implementing it from scratch to avoid licensing issues). I documented where each API/functionality idea came from, they we're strewn across several programs. This also showed that the ideas represented "current well known techniques", which no NDA can cover.
You can use exactly the same ideas, and you can implement them at home, and take them into work and let them use them (put in the copyright that you as an individual are the copyright owner, and they are fully licensed to do anything and everything they want with it in royalty free). At least then you'd be legally doing it.
Kirby
Interesting.
You Presume Google had no knowledge, and you presume MS has full knowledge.
Sound bias to me.
ALL corporations and business must be held accountable for the actions there employees take while 'on the clock'.
To exempt corporation from the behavious means there will be NO way to hold them accaountable. In a corporation, even the CEO is 'just an employee'.
Your example in poor becasue the person buying the TV is not PART OF THE COMPANY THAT DID IT.
Geez, this 3 monkeys attitude about Google is going to bite some people in the ass in the long run.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Unless you look at the code, or look at the bugs, this is not ironclad. What if the bugs are not implementation bugs, but conceptual bugs? What if Orkut had thought "Ok, friends should be able to see friends phone numbers" and forgot to check if the friendship relationship had been validated by the second user?
It's possible, in fact likely, that such mistakes would be propagated in any form of Social software that the author wrote until they are bought to his or her attention, because the flaw is in the design, not the implementation, and the designs stem from the same source.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
If your stupid Friendster imitation doesn't work just follow these easy steps to success:
1) Have a VP quit and go to google.
2) The vp "Reimplements" the app with some core code.
3) The rest of the team at google makes the crap actually run.
4) Put it out and lay low while the Google name rubs off on it.
5) Sue google and get your source back along with a few bucks.
6) Google fires employee
7) re-hire employee as CEO
If your father was going to work in a work van, it makes sense that his work can cover it, since he's only driving (and thus putting himself unknowingly at risk of a crash) because of them.
If he wasn't working that day and drove his own car somewhere and it happened, he would be liable.
Employers have to accept responsibility for work-related accidents that happen... if it happens at work itself or just around the corner, it's still "work-related", even if the connection is a bit vague...