That is essentially correct. However this fight is about more than just him. Essentially he took open source that he modified while at Goldman (Which Goldman prohibited him from releasing *fixed). So while his life is ruined (Although he is still better of then 99.99% of people out there) there is a mighty precedent in the works here: employees can't go to jail for legally following license.
> (Which Goldman illegally prohibited him from releasing, while license explicitly said if you modify it for commercial product you must make your contributions public)
I don't know the exact details of the case, but just to clarify: under the GPL, you don't have to release your changes if you aren't distributing that commercial product.
e.g., If he modified it for in-house use, there is, AFAIK, no legal obligation to release those modifications (under the GPL).
If he modified it for his own use, then that's clearly the case. If he modified it for the use of others within Goldman, they might have conceivably had a claim to a copy of the source under the GPL; he would not. I'm not entirely sure of that, or of whether employment contracts &c could limit that. For that matter, I'm not entirely sure what the answer should be there.
In the typical case, probably, but if you have a large organization you could easily wind up with one exception. What rights these people do and don't have still seems important.
One exception who invited legal trouble for the organization as a matter of some kind of principle would likely find himself no longer a member of the organization. In the best-case scenario, this person gets to see the source code for an internal tool. Who exactly is going to fund this legal battle?
What about one exception who was already on the way out? Or what about one exception who was engaged in industrial espionage?
I'm just saying if you're just relying on employees not exercising rights they have - after which something you've been trying to prevent distribution of can be freely distributed - your situation is somewhat fragile.
I originally read it in some in depth article that was talking about this. I can't find this now, so I removed that part. Now that I think about article might have been talking about "spirit" of open source license - if it is useful to you, contribute back, rather then actual license requirement.
If he gets convicted of a felony it is pretty certain he won't be able to work on high frequency trading systems that compete with GS, which is likely all that they want.
