[ak2196]

This might in fact turn out to be one of the biggest, most expensive blunders by the company in question. Years later the tale is recalled - aggressive misguided legal department sends a C&D to one of the greatest projects in human civilization. Internet responds by hackers pooling in time and resources to build an alternative, superior, free solution that becomes the benchmark effectively putting the aforementioned vendor out of business. Poetic justice.

[hectormalot]

The fact that CERN is not publishing the name of the company in question makes me think they know exactly know what to expect from the online community. I don't think it will be an alternative superior solution, but certainly some backlash against the company.

Would that be a justified response? By the exact reading of the law/agreement probably not. But then again, this student was free to use the software at CERN, he just went out of his way to also work with it on his laptop (for the same project I suppose). That means the company is punishing someone for using their software, even though there was no lost sale. For me it feels unnecessary to put a 30k CHF fine on someone that way.

[iofj]

IANAL, but I feel obliged to point out that the company, not the employee, carries the responsibility for respecting copyright and contracts it signed. After all, the student has no way to know what those contracts are, has not legally agreed to be bound by those contracts (he has not seen them, and his employment contract does not change that), and might have been instructed by his manager to do exactly this.

Essentially, this person could legally claim that CERN or one of it's employees requested he install the software, and to just download it if the normal process didn't work.

If as part of your job you violate commercial agreements (this includes copyright related infractions and licence violations), the company is responsible for any and all damages and contractual consequences of these action(s). Even if there is no contract involved, for example in the course of your job function, you drop a pallet onto someone's car, the company is responsible for the damages. They can, of course, fire you as a result of this mentioning something about "lack of proper judgement", but that's the limit of what they can do. They can also not withhold wages for any period the employee was under contract, no matter how much damage he caused.

There are exceptions which mostly relate to an employee signing contracts in the name of the company and criminal acts, but they don't seem to apply here (the company board must name and publish a list of people who are authorized to sign in the name of the company in a government registry. Anyone who signs an agreement with said company is responsible for comparing the signature of the contact with that list. If you fail to do this, the contract may be null and void) (also, this is assuming it was not a criminal act. But neither copyright law nor contract law falls under criminal law, so only copyright violations committed as part of your job cannot result in you losing more than your job)

This employee should immediately cease all communication with CERN relating to these damages, neither admit or deny anything at all and resolve the matter with the help of a labor lawyer. Ideally, he should continue to carry out his duties as specified in his employment contract, but NOT talk about this incident, instead requesting all communication relating to this happen through registered mail.

This strongly looks like CERN is trying to pull a fast one on an employee. CERN, not the employee, has to pay damages resulting from one of their employees violating a contract they signed.

[an_ko]

> They can, of course, fire you as a result of this mentioning something about "lack of proper judgement", but that's the limit of what they can do. They can also not withhold wages for any period the employee was under contract, no matter how much damage he caused.

Really? I could take a job with a software company, then purposefully pirate everything in sight, and the worst that could happen is I get fired? And the company has to pay the damages?

(Be right back, applying for an NSA job.)

[iofj]

There has to be a vaguely reasonable claim that you did so as part of your employment. For instance, you pirate work-related software. Or your manager asks you (I've seen that happen).

[JosephRedfern]

I suspect (but should stress that I don't know, my suspicions are based purely on name and the fact that it's listed on the CERN Engineering Software DB) that the software in question is Allegro AMS Simulator: http://www.cadence.com/products/pcb/ams_simulator/pages/defa....

Let's get building!

[trymas]

In my university we used COMSOL Multiphysics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMSOL_Multiphysics). It is 'AllSIM' software and in coincidence was used for very similar case as in the article.

[petercooper]

"CERN purchases multi-user licenses for COMSOL Multiphysics"

https://www.comsol.com/press/news/article/821/

"Another factor that was attractive was the fact that a single network license allows CERN to run a COMSOL job on any number of cores or a compute cluster."

And their "Floating Network License" allows use across an entire network, but not off that network: https://uk.comsol.com/products/licensing

[JosephRedfern]

True, that could well be the software they're refering to. The reason I suspected that it may be Allegro AMS Simulator was a combination of it being listed on the CERN Engineering Software DB[1] and the product name.

[1] http://information-technology.web.cern.ch/services/software

[petercooper]

Yeah, I would imagine CERN uses a lot of different packages. Indeed, they'd probably be mad not to run serious simulations across multiple systems to sanity check.. :)

[newjersey]

I'd love to help in any capacity I can.

[nhstanley]

Stuff like this often makes me consider writing an open source version of whatever the software is. If I really had to base my long-term livelihood off a piece of proprietary software, I wouldn't want to perpetually have such a sword hanging over my head. I work with many pieces of software where the core functionality is actually quite simple (more complex if you want nice features), and I'm actually doing this for one of them.

[roel_v]

Because of course you would write some software that CERN, with 100's of engineers and scientists, finds not cost-effective to build its own version of, on a sunday afternoon...

The naivete and total absence of awareness of how things work in the Real World in this thread make me shake my head. 'Hey all, someone should write an open source version!' - sure, and in the mean while, those same people gush over some guy raising 300k for "the next generation code editor" who then barely manages to build something that works at all, let alone is an actual improvement.

Software is hard and expensive, especially software that has actual domain knowledge embedded, unlike the 1000th 'micro js framework for single page apps' and fads like that. All the hate on people and companies who make a living selling software (gasp!) is... well, there is no other word for it - plain dumb.

(yes, I make (part of) my living from selling software)

[JupiterMoon]

Generally this type of software relies upon inertia and vendor lock in rather than actual technical advantage.

[roel_v]

Yeah - no. Do you have experience with high end scientific software¿ Because I have, and that sort of software is hyper niche and requires highly advanced domain knowledge as well as expert software engineering, and is usually the culmination of several man-decades of research and development. If it was truely the easy to replicate cash cow some seem to be assuming, there would be competition all over the place; or a lab would get some intern to replace it in 6 months. But they don't because it's impossible and they realize that Adam Smith's point about specialization holds for software, too.

[tripzilch]

Right. The university paid a high price for MATLAB licenses (fine go ahead and claim that's not "high end" enough for your example), so they're going to teach their students MATLAB, even when the free and open source combo of IPython+Numpy+Scipy+Matplotlib is at least equivalent, in many aspects better, AND uses a saner scripting language (Python) than MATLAB's with all its crazy warts and lack of modern (15 years ago) programming paradigms.

> If it was truely the easy to replicate cash cow some seem to be assuming, there would be competition all over the place; or a lab would get some intern to replace it in 6 months.

Okay, now I have to ask. Do you have any experience with interns at a university trying to write even, let us assume, a relatively simple and straightforward piece of software?

Don't get me wrong, I partly agree with you, nobody's going to rewrite the high-end scientific software in a weekend.

But you seem to be saying that's because it's too hard. What I'm saying is that the people with the domain knowledge (physics students, interns, PHDs, whatnot, even the computational science guys) are pretty much uniformly shit at writing software. It's a big reason why there's not a lot of code sharing going on in the scientific community: Shame. And that if it was published nobody would want to read it, and there's a rather big chance it would reveal fundamental research errors.

The real reason this "high end" scientific software is guarded so heavily is because the fact that they have other users than themselves, they know they are in possession of a unicorn.

Then there's the part where all the old professors have their (unreadable) scripts written for that ancient unicorn, so even if something better comes along, nothing's going to change much. And even if the students translate (read: completely rewrite and fix some longstanding bugs) those scripts to the modern software, the professors won't have anything to do with it because they don't want to learn the newer thing since they spent so much effort getting to know the arcane old thing (though they will claim they don't trust the new software yet).

Dinosaurs. People will wax nostalgic over having worked at (gasp) actual UNIX terminals in their university years. Except it was the year 1999 and you had to FTP to the one machine with a floppy drive to take your stuff home. Sorry I digress, but yaaaaay science.

[JupiterMoon]

Yes I have experience. That is where my comment came from actually.

[danielweber]

Someone's making money selling software! Let's put them out of business!

[toomuchtodo]

Someone's using arguably overly aggressive copyright laws to squeeze someone for cash they couldn't possibly come up with! Let's debate the ethics of selling software!

EDIT: The proper way to handle this would've been to say "Hey! Your site license doesn't cover this. Please don't do it again, as we depend on that license revenue to pay our bills to write great software."

[masklinn]

> The proper way to handle this would've been to say "Hey! Your site license doesn't cover this. Please don't do it again, as we depend on that license revenue to pay our bills to write great software."

That's mostly the proper way to get people to not care and end up killing your business anyway.

[toomuchtodo]

As opposed to "Fuck these guys"? Even if their software isn't replaced with an open source alternative, this buys enough bad will to have someone patch their binaries to prevent them from calling home and distributing them via torrents. That seems far more likely to kill their business.

[pyre]

Regardless of whether it's right or wrong the narrative is more like:

  > Someone that's selling proprietary software is
  > acting like an ass, let's teach them a lesson.

[JupiterMoon]

Unfortunately they are protecting the name of the software company. It is sad that they could not extend the same courtesy to their student.

[danielweber]

Is there some version of the article that names the student that 4 or 5 people have read? Or are people just seeing the name of the Licensing Officer at CERN and confusing it with the student's name?

[JupiterMoon]

Oh they are not telling us her name. They must be telling the company if they are to extract the payment from her though.

[sellweek]

Not really, the university may have paid it and then get the money from the student.

[JupiterMoon]

Well then the student would do well to not pay and to force the University to take them to court over the speculative invoice. Good luck getting undergraduate students to the University that will give itself the reputation as the enforcement arm of a copyright claim. (NB that in the EU no matter what the University blusters they cannot prevent graduation over unpaid charges.)

I am not a lawyer.

[sbuk]

RTFA. Ph.D "student". There is no 'graduation' as such. The university can refuse to accept the submission.

[sbuk]

They haven't named the student concerned. RTFA.

[JupiterMoon]

They must be telling the company her name if the charge is to be passed on. Otherwise she can simply not pay. I have read the article please do not swear at me even in acronym form.

[sbuk]

TFA refers to the student several times as 'him'. Again, RTFA.

[JupiterMoon]

In general people use "him" as a replacement for "him/her". Other people use the pronoun "her" to combat the implicit assumption that people must be male. Since they are not identifying the student in this blog post one cannot ascertain the sex of the student from the fact that blog post uses the word "him". My use of the word "her" had nothing to do with any fucking.

[AnimalMuppet]

> In general people use "him" as a replacement for "him/her".

That's one of the ways people use "him". Other times, they use "him" to mean that the individual in question is male.

These days, "her" to combat the implicit assumption that people must be male is common enough, it's almost safer to assume that "him" means someone who is specifically male.

[sbuk]

Look, you can use all the twists of logic that you like, the facts of the matter are these; the protagonist is male and they were in the wrong.

[cezary]

Looks like we need a new word to identify male if "him" no longer works.