Is this worse than the sort of thing that goes on in the early days of most startups, including our most revered? People around here have a lot of respect for pg, rtm, tlb and their startup Viaweb - go back to "Founders at Work" and read how they got computer time needed to get the startup going. That kind of thing is practically universal in startups. The good ones, anyway.
So Aaron appears to have cut some corners in getting an interesting project off the ground. Slap him on the wrist.
Well, this again is a very hacker-centric perspective. Even if it's truly important that someone be able to surreptitiously copy all of JSTOR once in a while for the sake of innovation, who is in a position to let him off based on that?
Plus, putting everything else aside and evaluating him as a hacker, he doesn't come out looking too good. If he'd scraped all of JSTOR without getting caught, it would make a better story. As it is, he attracted a lot of attention, and the report of how he was caught has an air of inevitability to it. JSTOR called up MIT, MIT was looking for him, and he gave them a lot of time to find him.
Is this worse than the sort of thing that goes on in the early days of most startups, including our most revered? People around here have a lot of respect for pg, rtm, tlb and their startup Viaweb - go back to "Founders at Work" and read how they got computer time needed to get the startup going. That kind of thing is practically universal in startups. The good ones, anyway.
So Aaron appears to have cut some corners in getting an interesting project off the ground. Slap him on the wrist.