Former Goldman Sachs senior programmer Sergey Aleynikov resigned in 2009 to join a startup and develop a competing high-frequency trading system. Before leaving, he uploaded 32MB of source code to a remote SVN server (a Free Subversion Repository in Germany). The 32MB of source code was actually the same 8MB of source code uploaded four times, and this code was modified open-source code by Aleynikov. The 8MB of source code contained both open-source and non-open-source code, with the non-open-source portion likely belonging to Goldman Sachs.
Aleynikov's offense was not particularly severe, yet in 2011, he was sentenced to 97 months (about 8 years) in prison for stealing Goldman Sachs' code. In February 2012, his conviction was overturned. However, in August 2012, he was arrested again. In the September issue of *Vanity Fair*, renowned financial journalist Michael Lewis invited experts familiar with high-frequency trading systems to review the case against Aleynikov, concluding that Aleynikov was innocent. Lewis suggested that even Goldman Sachs might not have fully understood the purpose or value of the source code in question.