« Yahoo! Overture Launches Local Match | Main | So You Though Gmail Had Privacy Issues? »
July 01, 2004
Did Google 'Steal' the Orkut Code?
Affinity Engines, a social-networking company has filed suit against Google claiming that the source behind orkut has been stolen by former engineer of Affinity Engines Orkut Buyukkokten.
The lawsuit claims that Orkut illegaly took the code with him when he joined Google (Orkut Buyukkokten was a co-founder of Affinity Engines) and he had also 'promised' not to develop competing social networking software.
According to the lawsuit: "In its initial investigation, AEI (Affinity Engines) uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs ... in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in orkut.com," and "The presence of these bugs in both products is highly indicative of a common source code.... orkut.com contains software and source code copied, developed or derived from AEI's inCircle software or source code."
David Krane, Google's director of company communications has commented that "Affinity Engines has not provided any evidence to Google that their source code was used in the development of orkut.com. We have repeatedly offered to allow a neutral expert to compare the codes in the two programs and evaluate Affinity's claims, but Affinity has rejected that offer. We have investigated the claims ... thoroughly and concluded that the allegations are without merit."
It must be said that the lawsuit is not helping Google's 'good guys' reputation at this stage. What will the effect of this, and the other, lawsuits be on the Google IPO remains to be seen.
Basileios Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at July 1, 2004 12:42 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.rugles.com/mty/mt-tb.cgi/423