Apple Settles with Tiger Leaker 349
The Hobo writes "CNet is carrying a story about Apple reaching a settlement with one of the Tiger leakers, 22-year-old Doug Steigerwald. The terms of the settlement were not released, but it was said that money will be paid to Apple. To quote Doug, 'As a member of Apple's Developer Connection program I received a pre-release version of Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' software, which I promised to keep confidential, instead, I disseminated it over the Internet, and thousands of unauthorized copies of Apple's software were illegally distributed to the public'"
Re:How Sincere... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure it was more like "In exchange for an apology and being an example to others, we'll reduce the fine from $500,000 to $10,000". So if you want to call lessening the punishment "coherced", you can. Apple gets what it want, untrustworthy developer get what he wants. Others might call it an equitable settlement.
Re:I think he lost a bit more than that... (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree. As a director of software and a someone that interviews hundreds of people, I can tell you that it's a big plus when you find someone that is interested enough in tech to be tinkering with things in their spare time (i.e. the average Slashdotter).
I'd say 80-90% of the people I interview are strictly 9-to-5'ers, they're there for the money and because "IT is a stable profession", not because they have a love for technology. They come in with MCSE and Certified Java Programmer labels, but they can't tell you what Firefox is, because it's outside the scope of what they are strictly required to know.
This guy is clearly interested enough in tech to be trying early access releases. While it was morally wrong to distribute the release, I don't think it's much worse than your typical MP3 or movie file sharer. I'd definitely let him interview with me.
Similar Thing Happend To Me (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure I downloaded For I was curious about it. Never got it to boot or anything, but I forgot about the copy left on the Limewire shared folder. Didn't think much of it since I never got the software to run properly, so I figured it was broken.
Couple of weeks go by and I get a very angry call from my ISP telling me to delete the file immediately. Apparently, Apple called them and told them I had an illegal copy of their software on my machine. Needless to say, it scared the crap out of them and they in turn scared the crap out of me for they were fearing a lawsuit, etc. etc.
The point of this little story is that this is nothing new on Apple's part. They're always protecting their R&D investment. And while the young and restless will snicker, it really taught me a lesson about respecting other people's hard work. This is something you don't learn until you start getting older apparently, for I would never have felt that way about it when I was a younger.
Do I feel sorry for the guy that got sued, well, not really. He violated a contract, an agreement, and when that happens you have to suffer the consequences. Besides, I think there is more to the story than we are privy to. It's a waste of money for Apple to send their legal bird of prey after a 22 year old unless he really did some damage. These days with things like BitTorrent, the damage grows exponentially...and unfortunately, so does the punishment as a result.
Re:I guess signing a Non Disclosure... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a non-native english speaker, I find these mistakes always very strange though :
I guess most of the people will still spellcheck, and when reading through their posts, they should be able to directly recognise 'their'/'there' 'than'/'then' and other, imo, obvious mistakes.
I heard this mentioned before, and I thought because I am a non-native speaker, I have to put more thought into structuring my sentence, instead of headlessly typing it : I am not saying I make more insightful comments, just that I pay more attention so my sentence doesn't get lost in translation.
Then again, I paid attention to this when talking to my (dutch) friends ; and noticed none of them making such homophonic mistakes in my own language (besides the obvious abbreviations which are made intentionally).