Questions tagged [ethics]

Ethics provide guidelines for personal and professional conduct.

Ethics provide guidelines for personal and professional conduct. Such guidelines include standard moral and legal behaviors (do not harm the health or safety of the public, be honest, obey the law) and also provide expectations for professional conduct (do not take on work you are not qualified to do, ensure adequate documentation and testing, etc.)

These guidelines supplement other legal and moral guidelines that professionals use to guide their professional conduct.

Examples of professional codes of conduct for programmers and software engineers:

Wikipedia has a nice writeup on computer ethics.

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Is it possible to rewrite every line of an open source project in a slightly different way, and use it in a closed source project?

There is some code which is GPL or LGPL that I am considering using for an iPhone project. If I took that code (JavaScript) and rewrote it in a different language for use on the iPhone would that be a legal issue? In theory the process that has…
Chris Barry
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How to avoid being forked into oblivion by a more powerful contributor?

As recently reported here: Xamarin has forked Cocos2D-XNA, a 2D/3D game development framework, creating a cross-platform library that can be included in PCL projects. However the founder of the project that was forked says: The purpose of the…
Den
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Can my company give IP rights away for an application I wrote off hours to another startup?

I am an intern for a health company (unpaid), let's call it Company A and I noticed that they are using a lot of paper form for things that can be done on the computer. Excel files for things that shouldn't be in Excel. So I wanted to improve on my…
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What is the/Is there a right way to tell management that our code sucks?

Our code is bad. It might not have always been considered bad, but it is bad and is only going downhill. I started fresh out of college less than a year ago, and many of the things in our code puzzle me beyond belief. At first I figured that as the…
sdm350
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Software License which discriminates on 'ethical' grounds

I've spent some time reading the common copyleft and permissive software licenses. Is there a license which allows the creator of an application or algorithm to broadly specify who may use/distribute the product based on their own personal…
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Should I include a selfdestruct-method to my applications?

I recently had a negative experience, where client bailed from the bill, but my middle-man already uploaded our software and design to the clients server. Client turned out be a known criminal, and of course he changed all possible passwords of the…
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What to do if you find a vulnerability in a competitor's site?

While working on a project for my company, I needed to build functionality that allows users to import/export data to/from our competitor's site. While doing this, I discovered a very serious security exploit that could, in short, perform any script…
user17610
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Usage of Pirated software at a company

I started to work at a company as an engineer a couple of months ago. It's a small company and what they basically do is answering service on phones. Now they are switching from normal phones to IP phones so that computers take more important place…
hakesh
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Is it ethical to teach teens about software viruses?

I volunteered to instruct an after school computer club at my son's middle school. There has been a lot of interest in computer viruses. I was thinking about showing them how to create a simple batch file virus that will infect other batch files in…
Jim McKeeth
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Should I tell the interviewer I already know the answer to the question being asked?

In a programming interview if I am asked a question I already know the answer for, such as giving an algorithm for a particular problem. Should I disclose that to the interviewer? This issue only makes sense when there's a novelty aspect to the…
El cid
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Is it ethical to use personal code at work?

I am working on a side project at work where I find it beneficial to use some of my code that I have developed personally (outside of work) to speed my development. My side project is developing a C++ GUI application to let our power users run…
CodeBlew
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If the spec is flawed, should it still be followed?

I have been assigned to develop an integration to one of my employer's applications to an external system developed by our client. Our client's specification for the integration that has some blatant flaws related to security. The flaws would allow…
Nick Orlando
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How could we rewrite the 'No Evil' license to make it 'free'?

I did not find the lawyers' SE site, so I thought it best to post here. /* * ...subject to the following conditions: * * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all * copies or substantial portions of the…
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Confusion about dual license (MIT/GPL) javascript for use on my website

I've read all of the posts I can find on this and I'm still not sure of the answer. I'd like to use a jQuery plugin on my website that is dual licensed under MIT and GPL. Does the dual license mean that as long as one or the other is satisfied I'm…
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Use of pirated/cracked software for development

Disclaimer: I by no means condone the use of pirated software. Have you ever witnessed the use of pirated software for development purposes? May be a company didn't have enough money to buy a piece of software and there were no free alternatives?…
ysolik
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