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Apple Fires Five Employees for Downloading Leopard
BuzzardsBay writes "The good folks at VARBusiness are quoting a ThinkSecret report that claims five Apple employees got canned over the unauthorized downloading of the Leopard OS. According to the article: one of the employees says:
"Because we had the character to tell the truth and to face the consequences of our actions, we were terminated. If we all lied and denied it would we still be working at Apple today? Even more so, is that the kind of person that Apple wants working for them?""
From the article: "The next-generation operating system, which is scheduled to ship early next year, were previewed by Apple executives at the Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco during the week of Aug. 7-11. " So it seems the terminated employees were fired for downloading an advance copy. Whoever uploaded it in the first place is probably looking at some sort of repercussions as well. If they can be found.
Oh no, not again.
"All of us know that we violated our NDA and ethics policy. Therefore, because we had the character to tell the truth and to face the consequences of our actions, we were terminated," said one of the fired employees, who spoke with Think Secret on condition of anonymity.
If you are full well aware that you violated the Non-Disclosure agreement -- in addition to the ethics policy -- you signed when you came on board, then, well, you should be full well aware of the fact that all you can expect is to be fired over it. NDAs are sort of a big deal for companies. Ethics, on the other hand, are a big deal unless if you have enough power.
The summary left out a big piece of information, in my opinion. They were just retail employees, not developers. I was puzzled why some developers at Apple *didn't* have Leopard at first.
Would Dreamworks have fired office staff if they had been talking about downloading a hot new Dreamworks movie via BitTorrent like "Over the Hedge"? What if the movie was still unreleased like "Dream Girls", or "Flushed Away" or "Transformers: The Movie". Even though it'd be bad publicity for DreamWorks to fire employees who are enthusiastic believers about their own products, it'd be worse to give them a wink and say "That's okay" if they really want secrecy.
Whether I agree or disagree with Apple's PR department about the wisdom of offering Leopard preview releases to developers only, that's the choice they made. It's not up to me, even if I were an employee of Apple, to try and change that policy or think that I'm somehow exempt from it. Apple's discouraging developers from talking about releases they have on Apple developer mailing lists even. It's doubtful that they'd make exemptions from their closed lips policy for staff in the Apple retail stores.
Sorry, this line of reasoning just doesn't work. "Oh, yeah officer, I murdered him. But I just came clean about it, so can I go home now?"
(I know, I know, not the same thing. But still, they violated their employer's intellectual property, wether they came clean about it or not, they deserve to get fired.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It makes perfect sense, and many legal systems historically have used this principle. A functional legal system will attach a penalty for crimes which exceeds their actual cost, proportionate to the chance of getting caught. I.e. if you destroy $100 worth of property, and confess to it immediately, you pay the $100 back, but if you have to be caught, you must pay significantly more than ($100*X/1), where X is the likelihood of apprehension in those circumstances. So if you have a 50% chance of evading punishment entirely, the fine needs to be over $200, otherwise it's rational to attempt to evade detection. If the fine is for example $500, and your chance of evading detection only 50/50, it makes good sense to immediately confess and pay $100 instead. If most people do that, then law enforcement can realistically attempt to catch the rest, but if the fine is the same amount either way, everyone attempts to evade, law enforcement has too many cases to chase, the chances of evading and the number of offenders attempting evasion start increasing in a feedback loop, and the result is uncontrolled breakdown of law, or a police state, which is sort of the same thing, and at any rate equally undesireable.
The whole plea-bargain system in this country, btw, is NOT an example of this. It actually has the opposite effect. If you confess your crime immediately, you won't be able to plea-bargain, since you have nothing to bargain with. But if you evade, not well enough to avoid arrest, but at least well enough to give your lawyer something to work with, that's how you get a plea bargain. This actually increases the incentive to evade, driving ever-increasing law enforcement requirements...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
That's all there is to corporate ethics policies, nothing more and certainly nothing on which anyone should being using to judge a person's character.
As for violating Apple's NDA - sounds like they used bittorrent to get a copy of the software from someone else who had originally made it public. That means they did not themselves take an internal copy from Apple and redistribute that. They only did what any other person on the net was capable of - go to a public website like isohunt and use the public information to get into the public torrent for the files.
Because bittorrent makes you a redistributor as well as a simple downloader, I am sure they are technically in violation of Apple's NDA - but realistically their employment at Apple had nothing to do with their downloading of a copy.
Thirdly - Apple, or rather whatever uptight member of lower middle management who actually made the call to fire these guys, is cutting off their nose to spite their face. Any retailer should be ecstatic to have store employees as interested in their own products as these guys (kids?) are. How many times have you all gone to best buy, or compusa or circuit city, etc, etc and been told absolute bullshit by some ignorant "sales associate?" When you've got employees that are so into your own products that they hunt down pre-release versions on the internet just check out for themselves, you need to keep them around, not fire them for trivialities.
Last and probably least, but it made me chuckle, did anyone else notice the plagarism at VAR Business? Their link to the story at ThinkSecret includes an unnecessary "?www.reghardware.co.uk" in the URL, which is another computer news website. Looks like a violation of corporate ethics policy to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think Apple could have taken it further if they had chosen to. They ex-employees could have been fired and then sued. Maybe the leniency for telling the truth is the lack of litigation.
Yes, and keeping their mouths shut is what they should have done.
They weren't fired for stealing; they weren't fired for copyright infringement. They were fired because they were found to possess copies of an unreleased software package that they had no authorized access to have. Didn't matter where they got it, the point is, they had it. They were fired for violating their NDA agreements, which most likely spelled out the consequences of that violation. Period. End of story.
The kind of employee Apple wants is one that will not: 1. Violate an agreement. 2. Talk too much. Both issues go to the employee's honesty and integrity.
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
When I was at the Valley Fair store for the Panther launch, a man asked me "what happens if I install this on more than one machine?" I told him "Well sir, you need to have a license for each machine." He said "Yeah, but what happens?" So, getting his drift, I answered "Well, there's nothing on that disk that's going to phone home to Apple and rat you out, but legally, that package entitles you to use it on one machine." He then said "See, that's what I love about you guys!" and he put back the single-license package and bought a 5-license family pack. He then came back to where I was stationed, and told me all about how much he hated Microsoft's product activation system for the next quarter hour or so. ;-)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There is absolutely no doubt that Apple shot themselves in the foot multiple times on this one. As you say, it probably would be smart to show the product to the salespeople. However, that they didn't do the smart thing doesn't mean that those salespeople then should take it upon themselves to peek.
If they were getting questions about Leopard, what they should have done was one of three things:
1. Been honest to the customer and said 'I dunno.'
2. Sold the customer up on the 'super-secretness' of the software and how that indicates its awesomeness, or some equivalent sales crap (that's what they get paid to do)
3. Tell Apple Corporate (probably through their bosses) that they are getting XYZ questions about Leopard and need answers to give people, in lieu of having personal experience with the software.
Instead they selected 'none of the above' and went for some lone wolf shit. Your bosses being idiots does not give you leave to disobey them; after all, the contractual obligations that an employee has to an employer generally includes their having to listen to the employer. That is, primarily, why you get the green (or in other countries, multi-colored) stuff. Only when the employer is doing something either illegal or unethical does this cease to be true.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Many years ago I was arrested (erroneously, but no matter) and while awaiting my turn in court I got to see the previous night's arrests being arraigned. There had been a prostitution raid, and a number of women were brought into court. One by one they would approach the bench, plead guilty, get fined $500 and be released. One woman, indignantly denying being a hooker, said she was only on her way to the corner store for groceries when she was arrested. When she pleaded not guilty the judge set bail at $1500 and remanded her to custody. Her response: "Wait a minute! If I'm guilty I pay $500 and go home? If I'm innocent I pay $1500 or go to jail? I plead guilty!" The public defender tried in vain to dissuade her, but to no avail. The judge accepted her guilty plea and she went home.
The moral: I don't know.
As far as the install disks. With Mac OS X, and some machine under OS 8 and 9, there were specific builds of the OS when those machines where shipped that supported those machines, and that is typically the OS on that disk, although they do upgrade those disks when new OS versions come out. It is also to help slow down piracy. A retail box OS will install on anything though (well not currently Intel machines but that will change with Leopard), all the way back to a B&W G3. Apparently if you pay the $129 retail, or $69 edu price they are less concerned with piracy... (that was a joke).
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I'm guessing they have a company lawyer that insists they follow the exact letter of the Apple Employee Handbook, regardless of the circumstances. Making exceptions leads to expensive lawsuits, and it's not like they didn't know the rules when they downloaded it.
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