More important from the Article. Many might not remember J.D. but he was very active in CRIME previous to joining Foundstone: .... Foundstone's troubles began last October when the company brought a trade-secrets case against J.D. Glaser, its former director of engineering, accusing him of stealing proprietary code. Glaser had left Foundstone in May to reactivate his old company, NT Objectives. After ten staffers followed him, Foundstone got a temporary restraining order barring Glaser from marketing his software. But a judge declined to grant an injunction, saying that Foundstone had not identified the trade secret and was unlikely to prevail on the merits. ... In most industries such a dispute would have been routine. But the computer-security industry prides itself on being an open-source community that shares innovations. That much is clear from Kurtz and McClure's bestselling book, Hacking Exposed, perhaps the most detailed account ever written of how to hack--and defend--popular computer networks and software. Things quickly went from bad to worse. Soon after the case was filed, Jason Glassberg, Foundstone's software-consulting guru and its key contact with Microsoft, the company's largest client, sent an e-mail to Kurtz. "This is bullshit," he wrote. "We will regret the day we became a litigious company. You realize you have zero support from the rest of the company on this action, don't you?" Kurtz promptly fired Glassberg, who was immediately offered work by Microsoft. The software giant then yanked its Foundstone business, which had accounted for about a quarter of the company's revenue. More staff defections followed. "Most of the people I know who work at Foundstone are looking for jobs elsewhere," says Jeff Moss, who runs the BlackHat computer-security conferences. Despite losing its bid for an injunction against Glaser, Foundstone is still pursuing the case in arbitration--a decision that sparked the piracy allegations, which will now make the case even more difficult to win. "How can you have a trade secret when your product was built on software that didn't belong to you?" asks Glaser. Saumil Shah, a former Foundstone employee and a highly regarded technical expert, says Kurtz, McClure, and Bahadur were involved: "There is absolutely no denying that they committed piracy. They did that knowingly and in huge volume." ... In March, Foundstone asked an arbitration judge to seal evidence of software piracy presented by Glaser. The company said it would preserve its records. But in early April, Kurtz called a staff meeting. "Don't do anything with your software," Kurtz says he told his employees. Then he made his next move clear: "If there's anything that's not in compliance, we'll get it addressed. We get the license, or we delete it." Foundstone lawyers say some software has since been deleted from the company's servers, but maintain that anything deleted would still be on backup tapes. ... Ahhh, JD Still in trouble :) On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 19:27, Andrew Plato wrote: > Oh oh - Foundstone accused of stealing software, ideas, etc. > See rest: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,457276,00.html -- Zot O'Connor http://www.ZotConsulting.com http://www.WhiteKnightHackers.com
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