Criminality is related to breaking laws. Doing business internationally is difficult because the laws are not consistent and cross-border enforcement is difficult in the best of cases. When entering into a business relationship you often don't know much about the people you are doing business with. People make similar mistakes in the U.S. by giving full and complete access to their source code to unknown and untrusted agents and then get screwed.
To be fair though, the developer probably has a different viewpoint. I've been screwed out of ridiculous sums of money on different deals through unscrupulous business owners thinking they had me over a barrel. Ultimately I always found it cheaper to walk away rather than trying to resolve it even in the U.S. court system. I have to wonder what would cause this person to react so hostilely for such a sustained period of time. This is personal somehow, there is no profit in this for TSC according to the story (100k wouldn't justify this).
There are always two sides to every story, this is suspiciously one sided and perhaps more disturbing it paints the entire indian culture and economy with the same broad brush.
The lesson here should be that development in general is hard. Outsourcing is even harder. Business disputes often get very messy, cross border disputes even more so. When engaging in any business transaction give serious consideration to what happens if this transaction goes south. Do they have access to your core systems? How bad can they hurt you? These exercises are just as valid with internal developers as they are with any external agent. Once you grow beyond the startup stage, building a sustainable and protectable business should be one of the main focus points of any management team. These guys made mistakes, who doesn't. This developer is acting childishly, it happens. Don't over-generalize from this single example.
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Sounds more like "Don't Outsource to Criminals" to me.
Criminality is related to breaking laws. Doing business internationally is difficult because the laws are not consistent and cross-border enforcement is difficult in the best of cases. When entering into a business relationship you often don't know much about the people you are doing business with. People make similar mistakes in the U.S. by giving full and complete access to their source code to unknown and untrusted agents and then get screwed.
To be fair though, the developer probably has a different viewpoint. I've been screwed out of ridiculous sums of money on different deals through unscrupulous business owners thinking they had me over a barrel. Ultimately I always found it cheaper to walk away rather than trying to resolve it even in the U.S. court system. I have to wonder what would cause this person to react so hostilely for such a sustained period of time. This is personal somehow, there is no profit in this for TSC according to the story (100k wouldn't justify this).
There are always two sides to every story, this is suspiciously one sided and perhaps more disturbing it paints the entire indian culture and economy with the same broad brush.
The lesson here should be that development in general is hard. Outsourcing is even harder. Business disputes often get very messy, cross border disputes even more so. When engaging in any business transaction give serious consideration to what happens if this transaction goes south. Do they have access to your core systems? How bad can they hurt you? These exercises are just as valid with internal developers as they are with any external agent. Once you grow beyond the startup stage, building a sustainable and protectable business should be one of the main focus points of any management team. These guys made mistakes, who doesn't. This developer is acting childishly, it happens. Don't over-generalize from this single example.
That would definitely be a better title!