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BigBad thieving
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20 Feb 2004
Almost a year ago I mentioned that Boston-based Web development firm BigBad was presenting some of my work (and the work of others) as their own. Worse, they were using the stolen work as an example of the cutting edge development they were doing.
I said…
I’m willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt. Elsewhere on their site, the code is credited to “Tim Seit, Applications Developer, BigBad.” Perhaps Mr. Seit didn’t tell his employers that he didn’t actually write any of that code. BigBad may be blissfully unaware of this mis-step.
Tonight Tim Seit contacted me by IM and apologized. He no longer works at BigBad and stumbled across my article when searching on his name. Tim said “when I came across the code I presented it to my manager as code that I came across during a Google search, not something that I had written. BigBad was made fully aware that I made no original contributions to that code.”
So apparently the management at BigBad knew they didn’t write the code but decided to take credit for it anyway, despite the objections of their developers.