[HN Gopher] Tata Consultancy Services ordered to cough up $210M ...
___________________________________________________________________
Tata Consultancy Services ordered to cough up $210M in code theft
trial
Author : pseudolus
Score : 205 points
Date : 2023-11-27 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| achow wrote:
| At the end of article..
|
| _However, the champagne corks won 't be popping at CSC just yet.
| If the Epic experience is anything to go by - the decision was
| appealed - there will likely be legal twists and turns aplenty
| before payments are made and the case is closed._
|
| 6 days ago: TCS will be making a balance provision of $125
| million in the December quarter of FY24, after the US Supreme
| Court rejected the company's plea in a matter pertaining to EPIC
| Systems Corporation.
|
| https://www.fortuneindia.com/enterprise/tcs-to-make-125-mn-b...
| xNeil wrote:
| I'm surprised the US Supreme Court is hearing cases filed
| against or by TCS.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| TCS conducts business in the US, so it is subject to US
| courts.
| wging wrote:
| They didn't hear it, and therefore the lower court's decision
| remains in place. That's what this means:
|
| > the United States Supreme Court on November 20, 2023
| rejected the Company's petition to file an appeal against the
| orders passed by the US Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| How soon - if ever - will AI tools be able to replace or at least
| reduce the demand for these offshoring companies? I've seen the
| code some of them put out. Even chatGPT 3.5 can be better than
| them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Beware of one wishes for, it starts with offshoring companies,
| juniors will follow and eventually only the AI druids will
| code.
| thejackgoode wrote:
| prompt shamans, yes
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Nope it cannot.
|
| I have been using 3.5 to write code. I wrote a 'simple' app
| (200-300 lines) that although 'simple' it took A LOT of back
| and forth with the 3.5. In the end I had to spend a couple of
| days combing through it to add some key features (i.e. set
| values to zero so you don't see old data, etc.). Basically
| crude (but smart?) coding (I am not a professional developer).
|
| When I finished the code and the app was performing EXACTLY as
| I wanted (v1.0), I thought to start planning for the v1.1 and
| when I pasted my code to the 3.5 and asked it to 'work on it on
| the new features' it was a shitstorm :)
|
| Perhaps it was me feeding the requirements 'wrongly', but it
| was like pulling teeth 'guiding' it to correct even the
| simplest mistakes.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| GPT can sew snippets of code and see patterns but it has no
| understanding of coding and such. But even without this
| ability it could work amazingly well if you know what to ask
| for and accept its limitations.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| This is also how it is with offshoring.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Someone who's not a professional developer was able to take
| the weakest model OpenAI offers today and get exactly what
| they wanted for a V1.
|
| Have you actually worked with a consultancy? Have you priced
| out what the back and forth you had with 3.5 would have cost
| with a real human with a similar level of depth?
|
| _
|
| I personally don't think AI's effect on offshoring will be so
| cut and dry, since it's not like offshore developers can't
| level up with it too, but your example is showing how badly
| people are underestimating the impact AI will have on
| programming.
| eddtries wrote:
| I think you'll find the most succinct requirements for a
| program is the code itself - you can add more and more logic
| to guide GPT to generate something but eventually you're just
| writing code yourself anyway.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| This is far too flippantly confident about a piece of tech
| that's barely a year old, and the inferior version of that.
|
| I'm surprised by the inability of people in tech to
| extrapolate the advancement of this particular tech.
| Semaphor wrote:
| They replied to this:
|
| > Even chatGPT 3.5 can be better than them.
| eastern wrote:
| It's like showing up at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and, "You mean
| this thing can't even fly me to New York? Useless!'
| GabeIsko wrote:
| I think there is a difference between mastering fluid
| dynamics to the point where you can have sustained power
| flight, and building a machine that arranges words next to
| other words based based problematically in training data.
|
| But even if you want to torture this analogy, LLMs are a
| godsend to techncial service Companies. It's like saying
| "Oh, planes are faster so I guess people won't be spending
| as much time traveling and there will be less of it now".
| financltravsty wrote:
| Try 4.0. I use it a lot for tedious glue code, and I couldn't
| be happier to have my time back to focus on more important
| things.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Didn't people ask that back in ~2000, "how soon before offshore
| employees take our jobs?". The devil is in the details. Can AI
| solve a linker error and fix a visual studio project file?
| Sure, if you train it with a million samples. I think the
| reason AI won't work for anything more than wireframe is that
| there are too many edge cases to adequately train it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Sure, if you train it with a million samples._
|
| I am not an AI guru, but, from my limited understanding, LLMs
| use _trillions_ of inputs, and that 's one reason why they
| work so well.
|
| What we have now, is barely out of the playpen. I am quite
| sure that specialized LLMs (like troubleshooters) are well
| under way.
| kfk wrote:
| You are looking at this the wrong way. Moving IT to offshoring
| companies is a risk mitigation strategy, now if critical
| systems go down it's someone else's problem.
| dmatech wrote:
| It's someone else's fault. It's even their problem. But it's
| still your problem too so long as it affects your business.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| chatGPT will likely improve the standards of many low skilled
| developers.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| A machine that doesn't actually understand anything, but is
| able to generate a ton of coherent text anyway? That's an
| offshore technical service company's dream.
|
| What did you say? That it is also complicated to deploy
| properly? And there is no objective way to measure its success?
| Christmas keeps coming early.
| srvmshr wrote:
| Without sounding controversial and having peers in Infosys/TCS
| since college days, I can attest that leaking design &
| implementation decisions between projects is very common in
| consultancies. I have personally privy to one such story where
| choices made in one healthcare giant's systems were
| "modified/adapted" to another. IP issues galore, these should be
| red flags but sneak under the radar being a consultancy
| neuronic wrote:
| To contextualize this, in my experience this doesn't happen as
| a result of some malicious conspiracy but rather as a natural
| outcome of working with various projects and exchanging with
| colleagues in various projects.
|
| For the consultancy it boils down to not reinventing the wheel,
| learning from others and sharing knowledge about what works and
| what doesn't. Typically, what is shared are anonymized generic
| design or cases and not actual code or design files though.
|
| Of course what is knowledge sharing and efficiency for
| consultants might simply boil down to IP theft for the affected
| companies. My question is rather how much of it is natural
| human social interaction and collaboration if you put dozens of
| people from dozens of projects into one room talking about a
| similar problem.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| It's not necessarily consultants in these companies that are
| malicious. I find working with many to be honest, and deeply
| caring about their work. It's that some of the management in
| these companies are incentivized to engage in duplicitous
| behavior to gain clients one way or another.
|
| Working for a tech consultancy before, they do have clear
| lines to distinguish for legal reasons and make you take
| courses. For e.g., you can't give or receive gifts of any
| monetary value, etc. But management find other ways, to gain
| client's trust and affection. One way is to overwork the
| consultants, and other is to share information that is privy
| sometimes.
| iamshs wrote:
| My Indian Engineering college had no course on ethics and nor
| were ethics mentioned even once. While Ethics was a mandatory
| course in my Masters abroad.
|
| Indian engineering colleges really need to start cleaning up
| the detritus, it is time to provide healthy base for the young
| ones. Once a culture builds up, the managers at consultancy
| will feel ashamed to cut loose on ethics even under pressure.
| Or not, but a start has to be made in this aspect.
| mikelovenotwar wrote:
| Worked for TCS, such 'courses' were mandatory, however as
| with all of their training cheating was rife.
| pooper wrote:
| I have never worked for TCS but just want to put this in
| context. Training cheating is not just an "IT" department
| problem.
|
| previously on HN,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38432752 Zenefits
| Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process
| (buzzfeed.com)
| triceratops wrote:
| People are taught "Don't steal" at age 4 or so. Revisiting
| that lesson in college isn't going to make a lick of
| difference.
|
| It's a problem of corporate culture and incentives.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Engineering ethics is quite a bit more than just "don't
| steal".
| triceratops wrote:
| This particular case involved stealing.
|
| Engineering ethics is knowing what's right or wrong when
| performing engineering work. Children develop a pretty
| decent sense of right and wrong. It isn't rocket science.
|
| A 22-year old ordered by their manager to falsify data in
| their first month on the job knows it's wrong. They
| aren't going to refuse because they took some course in
| college. Whether or not they do it is more likely a
| function of how prevalent that behavior is in the
| organization, how often it's caught, and how publicly
| it's punished.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| I think we should stop framing this as ethics. TCS tried
| to get the best outcome for their client. CSC decided the
| client should suffer because they didn't win the re-
| compete. That's basically retaliation. Also a Texas Jury
| deciding that an Indian company should give 210M to an
| American company? If you take a step back, none of this
| is about ethics.
|
| Now, with this kind of money and scrutiny you have to
| follow the letter of the law, whether it is productive or
| not. TCS should know better. But we can't pretend that
| this is about ethics.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| A 22-year old ordered by their manager to falsify data
| knows it's wrong, but doesn't know how to handle the
| situation. The point of ethics courses is to teach
| students how to handle situations like that, else they'll
| just continue to be exploited until they learn how to
| handle things on their own.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I don't really think ethics courses works even if you just
| ignore the facts that all ethics are subjective. Most
| companies I have worked with has ethics training with quiz in
| the start and it is obvious what the answer should be for
| each question and you are supposed to select that, not
| selecting what you would actually believe.
| SadCordDrone wrote:
| > Once a culture builds up, the managers at consultancy will
| feel ashamed to cut loose on ethics even under pressure.
|
| As if the engineering grads make these decisions and not
| managerial types with MBA degrees and "connections".
|
| Indian engineering colleges already have 2-3 such courses in
| curriculum and don't need to fit yet another subject which
| nobody cares about, instead of teaching actual skills.
|
| The actual knowledge of average Indian Engineering grad is
| very low, except in leetcode.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _yet another subject which nobody cares about_
|
| This is the root of the problem.
| chris_wot wrote:
| lol - my friend once marked a paper from an Indian student
| about ethics... they wrote that ethics should be the sole
| concern of the ethics department because "everyone is too
| busy and nobody has time to do ethics".
| manojlds wrote:
| My BE CS course in India did have ethics. Which university
| are you talking about?
| axus wrote:
| In this case "source code and documentation" were copied, these
| are concrete written artifacts. I'm not bothered by people
| sharing things verbally and implementing to a blank file.
| srvmshr wrote:
| In the case which I referred to being personally privy, a
| high-speed data bus of a rapid imaging system (which was a
| crowning advantage for the first) was 'adapted' over in a
| slightly different form. Personally, you could say "as long
| as they didn't Ctrl-C/V it is fine", but then implanting a
| winning feature to the competition product is a red flag to
| me. That databus didn't exist previously as a feature - and
| its addition was a innovation in rapidity.
|
| This happened in 1999-2001, so it isn't recent & won't affect
| any outcomes. But it goes on to say it can blunt a prior
| client company's competitive advantage.
| GabrielTFS wrote:
| It seems normal to me that if someone implements the same
| thing twice in a row they're gonna do it faster the second
| time. Though I don't know the specifics of your case (maybe
| they did copy-paste the original, who knows), it seems
| perfectly plausible that they did so without copying any
| code.
|
| To say that this always involves illegal copying of code in
| some way would imply that an employee is effectively
| forbidden from ever writing similar code in two different
| companies - are you supposed to be forbidden from re-using
| the experience you gained working for a company ?
| GabeIsko wrote:
| This wasn't just between projects - it was from one firm to
| another. So there is a conflict of interest; why would any gov.
| procure anything from anybody if a giant like Tata can swoop in
| and poach all your workers and steal your project? Personally,
| I think that any technical implementation details that does
| work for citizens should be public property and not commercial
| IP, but that's just me. It's not the world we live in.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| That's why governments should do more in house and rely less
| on consultancies.
|
| However in many cases of enter-rise software, everyone
| involved knows perfectly well that copying is happening. In
| which case there is nothing immoral ~ just a mismatch between
| elegant and actual reality.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| Yeah, I agree 100%. The only corollary is that I view a lot
| of settlements like this as much more protectionist. I
| thought that this was for a gov. bid and not an insurance
| conglomerate, but the principle is the same. DXC lost the
| bid, probably because they were doing a bad job. So they
| held the whole effort hostage and sued based on IP
| protections. And then the Texas court awarded the American
| company 210 Million dollars from the Indian company.
|
| In this case it is very straightforward legally if they
| copied documents over. You just can't do that, full stop.
| But I'm uncomfortable to say that this is an equitable
| relationship between all these companies, because it gives
| a level of protectionism to DXC to do a really poor job in
| delivery knowing that the American court system has their
| back if they lose on re-compete.
| crowcroft wrote:
| When it comes to consultancies/agencies this is basically put
| forward as a feature, not a bug. If you're doing a multi
| million dollar project of course you would want to bring in
| 'experts' with 'prior experience in the problem space'.
|
| My experience of it is in advertising, look at something like
| GroupM. They intentionally make a set of agencies to act as
| different front doors into the group so they can make it look
| like there are no conflicts of interest. Then once work comes
| in the door it all gets serviced by the same shared resources.
| The 'front door' agencies of course promote as a centre of
| excellence with deep expertise etc. but you really don't need
| to read between the lines very much.
| jmspring wrote:
| I think it goes one step further, the companies that employ
| these consultancies (including/especially healthcare) there
| are consistent patterns across companies in a given industry.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Check the contract (all of it) there may be something in there
| about sharing implementation with other clients.
| akudha wrote:
| I wonder how it can apply to an individual - say I am
| developing a feature at my job today. Five years later, I am on
| a different job, but developing a similar feature for some
| other employer. I wonder how much of the two implementations
| that are apart by 5 years but done by the same person, would be
| similar (even after accounting for my own personal growth in
| terms of programming abilities)? What if I am a teacher who is
| creating quizzes and exercises? Or a graphic artist making
| illustrations from eerily similar requirements?
|
| I suppose this is an interesting question, not quite black and
| white? That said, don't these huge companies have armies of
| lawyers to protect their IP?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Yup. The only surprising thing here to me was that the lawsuit
| wasn't around TCS taking a customer's own source code and
| selling it back to them as a consulting product.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > These former employees had access to its code and documents,
| and forwarded them on to the Tata BaNCS development team
|
| And these (ladies and gentlemen) is why you need smart IT
| auditors in your corporations. Also robust DLP systems with
| alerts when emails are sent to 'some' specific domains.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| "Copied on the wrong email" may cost them 210M
|
| Company CFO and CIOs need to do better dilligence of their
| vendors. Two simple contract clauses: priced soliciting to price
| staff pouching, and treble-5x damages for IP theft.
|
| Develop a heuristic - any consultancies brought on from 3rd party
| contracts must sign enhanced protection clauses. Cite publicly
| available info to support your position. All it takes is a quick
| google and a few boilerplate clauses
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Trick of the trade - either keep a former employee's email
| active or just forward all emails to their address to something
| searchable. Especially if they are an older exec that was
| terminated, because they will fuck stuff up all the time with
| their boomer butter fingers. You will get CCs on all sorts of
| email chains which will help you in future litigation and
| termination issues.
| fipar wrote:
| You could have given the same advice (which is very good, I
| do the same) without the age reference because if you've only
| seen boomers fuck up with butter fingers, you've been very
| lucky!
|
| (Preemptive disclaimer that I'm not a boomer. I'm not from
| the US, but if I were, I'd be gen X).
| eddtries wrote:
| You're actually gen X outside of the US too, unfortunately!
| fipar wrote:
| Heh, fair enough, I won't argue against that particular
| label, but my geographical disclaimer is because boomer
| doesn't really make sense (we never had a baby boom
| here).
| rithikjainNd01 wrote:
| That's not true! Google "Indian Generations" to
| understand where the difference lies.
|
| I believe it's divided like so: 1947-65: Invested in
| National Success and self determination. Do more with
| less is key. Govt Jobs are the best jobs.
|
| 65-80: First Gen to start moving abroad, more private
| opportunities, care about making money and enterprise.
|
| 81-00: First exposure to the West, TV, entertainment.
| More holistic in their wants and desires, such as love.
| Witnessed the westernization.
|
| 00-16: Grew up with Western ideas and tech right beside
| them. More online, more diverse etc.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| While Baby Boomer has a definition with a generally agreed
| upon starting date for births and a bit more fuzzy ending
| date, in recent years "boomer" has come to mean older
| people in general, usually those out of touch with current
| youth culture. From the perspective of a university
| student, a thirty year old giving advice on meeting people
| using OkCupid could be a boomer.
| RunSet wrote:
| On this week's episode of "CEO or LLM?":
|
| > "In any given quarter, there will always be some amount of de-
| growth. What's happening now is that de-growth is not being
| compensated fully because clients are optimising and there is
| some deferral happening," said K Krithivasan, MD & CEO, TCS.
|
| > "If the existing projects get paused or optimised more than the
| incoming revenue, it results in muted or moderated revenue
| growth," Krithivasan added.
|
| > According to Krithivasan, once things settle down, this
| optimisation will be compensated by new projects.
| londons_explore wrote:
| "optimization" means "our clients are spending less money with
| us".
| usrusr wrote:
| "Nice LLM you have there. Would be a shame if someone added CEO
| gibberish to the training set"
| kibwen wrote:
| No, that's a feature. Replacing your gormless CEO with a
| machine is one of the highest-impact ways to leverage an LLM.
| Frankly, it's a shame that OpenAI is too afraid to eat their
| own dogfood.
| deathtrader666 wrote:
| Professionals in the software service industry have mastered
| the art of saying "shit has hit the roof" without any shit.
|
| This, combined with "never saying no" and "never give bad
| news", has twisted simple communication behaviours.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is the first time I have read shit has hit the roof. It
| is usually shit hits the fan.
| ActionHank wrote:
| "degrowth" is some real BS.
|
| Actual words for this are "decline", "reduction", "shrinkage",
| "decrease", hell even "atrophy".
| close04 wrote:
| The goal of these words is to minimize the negative
| associations, or maximize the positive ones. A lot of
| corporate lingo is aimed at this. It's a trend that won't die
| (pardon, "won't un-live") because it's unreasonably effective
| at obscuring an otherwise bad situation.
|
| Either it leaves a better or less worse opinion of what was
| said compared to normal language, or it makes everything so
| unclear that the listener has no hopes of understanding the
| real, desolate, message.
| antonvs wrote:
| "Degrowth" is weird enough that I think it more likely
| calls attention to a problem than hides it.
| aifooh7Keew6xoo wrote:
| "degrowth" sounds like something you have a dermatologist
| remove from a butt cheek because it could become
| cancerous
| euroderf wrote:
| Post Traumatic Profitability Disorder
| charles_f wrote:
| There's no degrowth in that case, tcs clearly has deinvested
| maintenance of its humanoid resources, resulting in
| deperformance, ultimately ending in the detrust of its
| customers, who will degive them their money, tcs deriching,
| and deemploying people. One can only hope those will
| successfully deunemploy, hopefully following the dedecline of
| the economy
| tw04 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised to find out they intentionally avoid
| using certain words to try to bypass trading bots that
| trigger on keywords.
| BeetleB wrote:
| This is a real learning for me. It is now my ask of my fellow
| coworkers to stop using verbs as nouns.
| lawlessone wrote:
| LLMs make more meaningful text than this
| lukeinator42 wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT to rewrite the quote to be more readable and
| this is what it came up with:
|
| "Every quarter experiences some level of decline. Currently,
| this decline is more noticeable because our clients are
| optimizing their operations and delaying certain activities,
| which isn't being completely offset," explained K Krithivasan,
| MD & CEO of TCS.
| siva7 wrote:
| Hate to say it, it's better.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I remember some TATA people visited my college.
|
| It was supposed some event about signing up for intern roles with
| them.
|
| Instead they had some activity that people had to do and it was
| more like a mini competition.
|
| The example activity was they had acquired some company and the
| objective of the task was giving ways to tear the acquired
| company apart to extract value (layoffs, spinoffs, IP etc).
|
| I left during the break.
|
| It's a bottom to top evil company.
| mikelovenotwar wrote:
| >It's a bottom to top evil company.
|
| Worked there for a while, can confirm
| neilv wrote:
| That sounds like a refreshingly upfront recruiting first
| impression.
|
| And the winning kid to join the Wonka consultancy was the one
| who not only chopped up the hypothetical company, like all the
| other kids did... but then also loaded what remained with debt,
| while self-dealing (or whatever it is they do)?
| dingi wrote:
| One of our clients had a consultancy agreement with TCS. As one
| of their software vendors, we had to work with some TCS guys. It
| looked like their job was to make other people's work harder.
| They were full of work politics, bad mouthing other people, and
| shit like that. They didn't seem to be good at their job either.
| mavelikara wrote:
| Many of these business domains - insurance, healthcare etc - have
| complex state-specific business rules evolved over decades. I'd
| even suspect that the software implementations in some big
| players, like Epic, would be the default interpretation of some
| regulations (like, say, CRuby acts as the specification for Ruby
| language).
|
| It seems TCS might have tried to plagiarize those rule
| implementations.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| No, it's probably implementation specific. They probably
| refered to some documents regarding the ongoing implementation
| of a DXC app. Remember that with the enterprise deals it is
| pretty custom how these things are deployed. CSC probably set
| something up for Transamerica, and then info about it leaked to
| TCS. Probably through one of the 2000 Transamerica employees
| they poached. I doubt there is any internal platform
| documentation that got leaked, or that CSC even has access to
| from its vendors that TCS doesn't. Who knows what kind of
| vendors are under the hood of this thing.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| Man, it sucks that the law makes this situation. Texas would
| rather punish TCS than have stuff work well. But I guess you
| can't go around sharing confidential information - it's a big no
| no in these contracts. TCS should know better.
| mikelovenotwar wrote:
| >Texas would rather punish TCS than have stuff work
|
| Why would it have to be one, and not both?
| GabeIsko wrote:
| Let's say that I hire you as a software engineer. I tell you
| to implement several new features in the product you are
| assigned to. But, you aren't allowed to read any
| documentation or source code of the project you are working
| on. It exists, but by law you aren't allowed to read it.
|
| That's the situation TCS contractors are in. Now, laws are
| laws, and we have to follow them. There is always plenty of
| money to do things by the book. I thought this was a gov.
| project, not insurance, but the principle is the same.
| Transamerica is getting worse service because the contractor
| that they prefer wanted to look at documentation for a system
| they payed for. This is why enterprise IT is a legally
| mandated mess.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It sucks that they wrote a contract where they didn't have
| legal access to redistribute documentation to the
| contractors they hired, but them's the breaks when you
| write shitty contracts. Any insurance company has armies of
| lawyers available, so it's hard to feel bad for them.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| Oh yeah, you need to follow the law, no doubt about that.
| But is the law there to provide an ethical framework for
| productive business to occur, or to provide a level of
| protectionism to local interests? I don't think you can
| look at the Indian IT industry and think the former.
| johnduhart wrote:
| > Transamerica is getting worse service because the
| contractor that they prefer wanted to look at documentation
| for a system they payed for. This is why enterprise IT is a
| legally mandated mess.
|
| No, I don't believe that's at all what was happening. I
| really recommend reading the original compliant[1]. TCS was
| leveraging their employees with access to CSC's
| documentation and source code to glean information about
| how a particular feature was implemented, _not_ for
| supporting Transamerica, but for reimplementing the feature
| in their own product.
|
| From paragraph 29 of the compliant:
|
| > A TCS employee, who upon information and belief is part
| of the U.S. BaNCS development team, wrote in an email:
| "Quite honestly, I'm not sure how VTG [Vantage] does this
| today, so maybe we should engage [TCS employees with access
| to the Vantage source code] if we want to emulate that?"
|
| The complaint goes on to describe the engineers sending the
| actual source code to the team. This is pretty clear cut
| theft IMO.
|
| 1: https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/22/csc_complaint.pdf
| GabeIsko wrote:
| Yes, I have stated that I understand it is legally a no-
| no because they are violating the terms under which they
| have access to that documentation. But ethically, I think
| it is a lot less clear cut, because it allows CSC/DXC to
| hold their platform hostage and not really have to try
| for re-competes because they know that they can try their
| luck in court. They gave TCS access to the documentation,
| is it really a good use of the American justice system to
| enforce what they do with it? Is it a matter of ethical
| concern? I don't think so.
|
| This is why enterprise IT is a mess. Every time you need
| to do anything, you have to triple check that you aren't
| violating some clause buried in some obscure legal
| agreement that you probably don't have access to. Or
| else, you could cost your firm a quarter billion dollars
| or more. So you end up with reams of dead software that
| is unusable by design since it is being held hostage by
| various different commercial interests. I understand that
| is just the world we live in when millions of dollars are
| involved, but we can do better.
|
| On the other hand I get the concern: you would want some
| legally enforceable agreement with TCS that they won't
| steal confidential information you share with them in
| good faith to steal business. Nor go and hire a bunch of
| staff to poach your contract. But documentation of the
| software that Transamerica paid for is secret, are you
| kidding me? They would have been fine, legally, if they
| got the materials directly from Transamerica. Because
| they got it from someone who merely used to work there,
| it is a quarter of a billion dollar mistake. Seems like a
| pretty narrow difference to me, hardly some kind of grand
| ethical quandary.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Makes me wonder if they did the same for a large system we built
| for a state agency. I was lead developer on that project, so I'm
| pretty familiar with most aspects of it. The first few years
| after delivery, the agency had us come back a couple of times for
| change requests and to train their in-house developer when there
| was turnover in that role. At some point after I left that
| consultancy, the agency switched to using TCS. A few years later,
| several other states had very similar systems built for them by
| TCS. While I can't see any of the internal management portions,
| based on URLs, the public facing portals all use similar somewhat
| obsolete tech stacks. The workflow is also the same.
|
| But I have no way of knowing what happened behind the scenes.
| Perhaps the state agency gave TCS a license to use the code we
| developed (the agency, not our consultancy, retained ownership of
| the code). Or maybe some of the TCS people who worked on
| maintaining the code for the agency later went on to build a new
| system from scratch inspired heavily by our system. There's no
| way to really know from my vantage point, but given this story,
| it sure makes me wonder.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Didn't Nvidia also get pulled up by courts recently for stealing
| code? I am not condoning either action, but this seems to be a
| tech culture issue of which almost every company seems to be
| guilty of rather than just everyone's fav punching bag tcs.
| 8BitArmour wrote:
| This HN post w.r.t TCS has aged like wine:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2628318
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Tata!
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