"He discovered, to his surprise, that Goldman-Sachs had a one-way relationship with open source." #readingToday

That is how he spent the vast majority of his two years at Goldman, patching the elephant. For their patching material he and the other Goldman programmers resorted, every day, to open source software— software developed by collectives of programmers and made freely available on the Internet. The tools and components they used were not specifically designed for financial markets, but they could be adapted to repair Goldman's plumbing. He discovered, to his surprise, that Goldman had a one-way relationship with open source. They took huge amounts of free software off the Web, but they did not return it after he had modified it, even when his modifications were very slight and of general, rather than financial, use. "Once I took some open source components, repackaged them to come up with a component that was not even used at Goldman Sachs," he says. "It was basically a way to make two computers look like one, so if one went down the other could jump in and perform the task." He'd created a neat way for one computer to behave as the stand-in for another. He described the pleasure of his innovation this way: "It created something out of chaos. When you create something out of chaos, essentially, you reduce the entropy in the world." He went to his boss, a fellow named Adam Schlesinger, and asked if he could release it back into open source, as was his inclination. "He said it was now Goldman's property," recalls Serge. "He was quite tense."

Flash Boys, Michael Lewis