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.'"
I worked for a startup where our whole product line was based on a voice core that one of the developers had stolen from his previous employer. 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.
Of course, Google ain't some startup run by a bunch of shit-for-brains dysfunctional asshole managers (not that I'm bitter or anything). Just given the sort of company Google has been (aka, not stupid), if the claims pan out it seems to me most likely that this is a situation where this developer came in and unpacked some work he'd done elsewhere -- hell, I have a set of scripts I've developed over the years that I take with me from company to company so I don't have to rewrite them (of course, none of them face the outside or even provide output to anyone other than me).
If that's the case, and assuming this developer actually didn't have any legal rights to this code, it seems to be like Google shouldn't be liable unless this company can prove they used the code knowing it was swiped; otherwise, the lawsuit should be against this developer (not that the developer has hugely deep pockets or an impending IPO to work against).
Alternatively, isn't it possible that this developer just reimplemented the same sort of paradigm he was used to and that caused the same sort of malfunctions? This doesn't seem to far-fetched to me, especially if the bugs are in the overall logic of the coding rather than just a misspelling here or there. I know I've made the same sorts of mistakes even on a complete reimplementation just because nobody had caught them previously...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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...
Why would someone lay claim to that unscalably, buggy pile of crap they call orkut code?
It breaks regularly, and when it is running, its slow as dirt. Honestly, I'd just suck it up and not admit that it was mine!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If by "popular" you mean "only used by a handful of dorks performing a sort of digital circle-jerk", then yeah, it's popular...
Given how unstable and unreliable Orkut has been lately, I reckon Google should sue back! :-)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
If you have made promises like that to your former company, it's a pretty dumb idea to name the software that publically breaks those promises with your own name.
"Hay guys, I won't develop any social networking services for rival companies or use the code I wrote for you!"
"Cool Orkut, thanks, that'd be legally binding then."
*several months later*
"Hmm, I think I'll call the service 'Orkut'. They'll never know it was me."
Update: AEI asked to produce stolen code, claims it is in a briefcase in Germany that their lawyer will bring to court, when he gets around to it.
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.
"Buyukkokten promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn't develop a competing social network service for Google. "
Not to be cynical, but did he sign any non compete clause or something? Because a simple promise won't really hold much water in court.
I hope this is the engineer rather than Google though, I'd hate to see them stubmel like that.
~G
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
Not that I want to bicker about it, but I thought it was interesting that my submission was rejected and then made it to the front page all within 30 mins or so.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
My Google Stock!
...Wait Google's not public yet... whew
I guess posting this conundrum is my way of abstaining...
Hmm,
I wonder if the fine folks over at SCO will bother to watch this.. If it turns out Affinity has a real case, SCO will see stark differences between what they're trying to pass off as a case of misappropriation, and how the Real World(tm) functions..
US$0.02++
Open source social network software does exist, it's called PeopleAggregator, launched by Mark Canter of ex-Macromedia and the link goes to the Slashdot discussion of the product.
Doesn't have all the features that some networks have, but there are plenty of Web coders out there.
"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,"
So they're suing him because he stole their proprietary bugs?
I think we need to be clear in the understanding that there's a potential disconnect between the intended actions of Orkut the programmer (as opposed to the service) and Google the company. It may well be that Google believed they were getting something written for them from scratch, when in fact the programmer was re-using a ridiculous (and legally actionable) amount of his old code. I tend to believe that if any infringement did occur, that this is the story behind it, rather than Google willfully and knowingly infringing.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
If you are going to pirate some code from your
old company and bring it to your new company,
make sure you debug it before the world sees it.
dtg
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
Typically in lawsuits like this, if the act was a willful violation of contract terms and/or copyright, they can get rather substantial penalties beyond actual damages. If Google can show that this programmer introduced this code in spite of their efforts to prevent such things, rather than as a result of encouragement to get it out the door, they may be off the hook for these extra damages (punitive and statutory) though I don't think the programmer has much of a chance at that. Of course, establishing the value of actual damages in a case like this is always difficult as well. Hopefully they'll be able to settle with a licensing agreement that makes everybody mostly happy. Google probably has the resources to rewrite everything, but at this point that's probably not practical.
I hope this doesn't put too much of a damper on the 20% projects at Google. They keep turning out a lot of really cool stuff because of those, and it would be really unfortunate if liability forced them to micromanage their research.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
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.
...and I'm going to take away 2 of the three "sexy hearts" and all the little "trusty" icons I gave him!
Best Buy can have you arrested
/* I worked for a company that had source code stolen by a former programmer, who went on to produce a very similar product for another company at about half the price. We saw identical functionality, shortcomings, even a case of a same hideously ugly sprite, and after siezing computers gobs of identical source code. Before a judge, they argued that given the same task, identical source code may result. The judge was not a technical judge who listened to arguments on this for about half a year before excusing himself... after a new judge was reassigned I remember we had Plauger lined up to testify on the ridiculousness of this assertion... while examining his copy of the code he also apparently found that identical tasks were producing identical whitespace, thanks to the original programmer's (the guy didn't even limit himself to stealing what he wrote) habit of hitting the spacebar before hitting enter on the end of every line. When this evidence was introduced the other company cut their guy loose and tried to claim ignorance. Not sure what happened there, as by this time it had dragged on long enough that they had to start letting people go, including me, and our company never recovered... */
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Clearly, Microsoft and SCO have both stated that closed, proprietary code *cannot* be stolen unless the stolen code ends up being GPLed. They've pretty much demanded that theft of closed, proprietary code for the purposes of being included into other closed, proprietary code *cannot*, *does not*, and *will not* happen.
So, bull@*#. No code could have been stolen. To suggest otherwise... why, it'd be chaos! Proprietary vendors stealing code?! It cannot be! Think of the implications! It cannot be!!
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
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?
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?
Google is saying Affinity refused. That doesn't make it so. They have an IPO to think about. We should make sure it's all true before we use the "s" word.
I'd like to see some 3rd party verification on those bugs. For example, were they actually present when this developer changed sides? When did they crop up in Google's code? Of course, the way some people define a "bug" they could be claiming there are nine similar UI concerns. We really need to see a list of exactly what these bugs are before any of us can decide on the likelihood of possible causes.
I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a SCO-style lawsuit. They'd better be careful though because if they publicize this much, Google will counter-sue for damages when their claims fall apart.
On the other hand, if code has been illegally copied than this guy AND Google should lose some real respect. I honestly don't believe no one else at the company knows what this guy is doing. They should all be in very close contact. Large chunks of copied code would probably be noticed... maybe not though. Either way, they'll both take heat.
step 2: get a covert programmer to join a successful company. Have him insert your code.
step 3: accuse successful company of stealing and sue them.
step 4: get a big settlement, and make your covert programmer "dissapear" to silence him.
and repeat. watch out Orkut
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
In California, you can't prevent someone from moving around to competing companies in their field of work. Even if Buyukkokten signed 100 agreements saying he wouldn't develop another social networking product for another company, the contract is deemed invalid under California law.
What he can't do is reveal trade secrets to the new company, or if it is reasonable to expect that he will divulge such secrets in the normal course of his work.
So the fact that he signed agreements saying that he wouldn't create a competing product is 100% baseless. He can do this, even if he agreed not to.
It is up to him to ensure that he didn't steal any code or use trade secrets from AE in his work at Google, and an independent source code review would reveal this. If he did steal code, then he's up shit creek. If he didn't, then the whole thing is just to extract money.
I'm pretty sure that Google would have already gone through the due diligence to ask this guy if he did steal the code. He would be **really** stupid to deny it if he did because so much is on the line. I think if it has gone this far, Google is fairly confident that the code was new work.
I bet AE is delaying the neutral code review in hopes that Google will just pay them money to go away before their IPO.
If their product runs on UNIX, they're code belongs to SCO. They obviously did a terrible job of prtecting SCO's IP when they allowed Orkut to leave the company with his memory intact. Expect Darl to sue AEI in the next week and Google the next. Just for kicks I'll bet the sue Friendster for "Incitement to commit IP theft"
As seen on Wired: Get a free desktop PC
my understanding (which for the purpose of this post is derived solely from the spew of Darl McShitbag) is that IP theft is an Open source issue, and the big benefit of proprietary code is that it's all clean.
So I just refuse to believe otherwise. this has to be a hoax. someone contact snopes immediately.
I'd almost bet my next paycheck that this is a nuisance suit brought on by a sore loser. As has been pointed out, a prior employer can't ask you to commit to "not compete".
In addition to that, a lot of people learned a lot of hard ball during the tech explosion of the 80's. I don't know a software engineer or a programmer today that doesn't read employment agreements thoroughly and know to not commit to certain language in certain agreements, even if they're unenforceable on their face. You're better off not signing it and not allowing lawyer "interpretation" afterwards.
I can't imagine a Ph.D being dumb enough to sign anything that would give these folks a reason to sue. Either that or he *did* take IP with him when he left.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
is slashdot. Everyone knows what bukkakke means.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Drop "randomly" from your sentence and you'd be correct. Why reinvent the wheel?
I was so sure it was written by a Finn that I didn't bother checking.
You see, 'orkut' is colloquial Finnish for 'orgasms', which seemed both appropriate and something a Finnish nerd would come up with to describe social interaction.
The power of wishful thinking...
I'd really like to meet that 0.297th person. They must be really skinny, or maybe really short.
The last perspn to sign on was a manager - that's the percentage of humanity left.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's insane isn't it? That's like a carpenter bringing the hammer he used on the previous job with him to use on my house! The nerve!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Obviously, this list of bugs proves Orkut copied his code!
Best Buy can have you arrested
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
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