<story><title>Tata Consultancy Services ordered to cough up $210M in code theft trial</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/24/tata_210m_code_theft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>srvmshr</author><text>Without sounding controversial and having peers in Infosys&amp;#x2F;TCS since college days, I can attest that leaking design &amp;amp; implementation decisions between projects is very common in consultancies. I have personally privy to one such story where choices made in one healthcare giant&amp;#x27;s systems were &amp;quot;modified&amp;#x2F;adapted&amp;quot; to another. IP issues galore, these should be red flags but sneak under the radar being a consultancy</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crowcroft</author><text>When it comes to consultancies&amp;#x2F;agencies this is basically put forward as a feature, not a bug. If you&amp;#x27;re doing a multi million dollar project of course you would want to bring in &amp;#x27;experts&amp;#x27; with &amp;#x27;prior experience in the problem space&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;My experience of it is in advertising, look at something like GroupM. They intentionally make a set of agencies to act as different front doors into the group so they can make it look like there are no conflicts of interest. Then once work comes in the door it all gets serviced by the same shared resources. The &amp;#x27;front door&amp;#x27; agencies of course promote as a centre of excellence with deep expertise etc. but you really don&amp;#x27;t need to read between the lines very much.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tata Consultancy Services ordered to cough up $210M in code theft trial</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/24/tata_210m_code_theft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>srvmshr</author><text>Without sounding controversial and having peers in Infosys&amp;#x2F;TCS since college days, I can attest that leaking design &amp;amp; implementation decisions between projects is very common in consultancies. I have personally privy to one such story where choices made in one healthcare giant&amp;#x27;s systems were &amp;quot;modified&amp;#x2F;adapted&amp;quot; to another. IP issues galore, these should be red flags but sneak under the radar being a consultancy</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neuronic</author><text>To contextualize this, in my experience this doesn&amp;#x27;t happen as a result of some malicious conspiracy but rather as a natural outcome of working with various projects and exchanging with colleagues in various projects.&lt;p&gt;For the consultancy it boils down to not reinventing the wheel, learning from others and sharing knowledge about what works and what doesn&amp;#x27;t. Typically, what is shared are anonymized generic design or cases and not actual code or design files though.&lt;p&gt;Of course what is knowledge sharing and efficiency for consultants might simply boil down to IP theft for the affected companies. My question is rather how much of it is natural human social interaction and collaboration if you put dozens of people from dozens of projects into one room talking about a similar problem.</text></comment>