Google and Apple settle

Eliana Dockterman has a Time article about yet another Silicon Valley legal battle:

Reuters reports that Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe have admitted to having an agreement to not poach one another's employees, yet denied that driving down wages was their motivation for the collusion, weeks before the trial based on a class-action lawsuit was due to begin
About sixty thousand tech employees had filed a class action lawsuit against the four companies in 2011, accusing them of agreeing not to hire one another’s employees in order to drive down salaries. The plaintiffs cited emails from top executives like the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which they discussed an agreement not to poach each others’ workers and thus enter a salary war.
In one particularly damning email, Schmidt tells Jobs that an employee recruited from Apple to Google will be fired per their agreement, an email that Jobs forwarded to an Apple human resources executive with the comment: “:)”
The companies admitted to having a no-hire agreement, but denied that they did so to lower wages. Other companies refused to participate in such agreements: Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg refused to agree to such terms with Google in 2008, according to documents. Heading into trial, the employees were seeking three billion dollars in damages.
The four companies settled a civil suit in 2010 facing the same charges they did in the class action lawsuit. At the time, the Justice Department noted that “cold calling” or companies recruiting from competitors’ ranks was best for the worker: “This form of competition, when unrestrained, results in better career opportunities.”
The trial for the class action had been scheduled for the end of May 2014. The plaintiffs and the companies will disclose the principal terms of the settlement on 27 May 2014.

Rico says he wonders what CEO would be stupid enough to send stuff like that in an email? (Jobs is dead, so we can't ask him, but he was arrogant enough not to care...)