Fuck them all
If I was Alex I'd take them to the Human Rights Commission. Imprisoned and basically deported for releasing a steaming hot turd to the media...
Alex Kibkalo, the former Microsoft worker who pleaded guilty in April to leaking company secrets, is likely headed back to his native Russia in a week or so, having been sentenced to serve a brief stint in prison. According to court documents, Kibkalo was formally sentenced on Tuesday to a three-month prison term, per his plea …
He got pissed off over a poor performance report and decided to get the finger to his company.
Admirable? Sure.
I am surprised at the outcome ? No, using the services of a company you are leaking information about... really.
I wonder what his book will be called, "how I got common sense beat into me" perhaps.
Note that he did not use the services of Microsoft to leak the secrets. It is his correspondent who happened to have a hotmail account.
He probably did not expect that Microsoft would go through the private emails of a journalist to track him down. Few people expected it, really.
An analogy, maybe - if you have a contract with someone to not beat you up, then they beat you up, you're not going to sue them for breach of contract but for beating you up...
So it's not for breach of contract, but for damages, surely? Employee or not, he apparently damaged Microsoft's business (*stifles a chuckle*) by sending out pre-release code.
"Since when did someone get jail time for what amounts to breach of contract?"
It's not breach of contract, it is theft, many people go to jail for theft. He stole data then gave it away. If you worked for craphone whorehouse and stole a batch of phones from their stock room you'd have the police knocking on your door, this is the software equivalent of that.
"After receiving a poor performance report, he reportedly became disgruntled and leaked prerelease Windows 8 software to an unnamed French blogger."
Why did the poor performance report make him hate French bloggers that much? It is a mystery. Will we ever know?
"That doesn't mean he's free to come and go as he pleases, though. In fact, only the "go" part is allowed, as US authorities plan to deport him once his sentence is served."
Send him home now so the taxpayers don't pay for his keep. If Microsoft wants him to serve the full sentence, then they can get their checkbook out and pay for it.
It is not like the leak of a pre-release of Windows 8 hurt it, Windows 8 does that all by itself.