Questions tagged [ethics]
Ethics provide guidelines for personal and professional conduct.
93 questions
-1 votes
1 answer
98 views
Designing a Distributed System for Indigenous Data Sovereignty Across Nations [closed]
I'm looking for some quick "back-of-the-napkin" thoughts from systems engineers on the following scenario: A collection of Indigenous groups (in the US, Canada, and Australia) want to design ...
-4 votes
1 answer
135 views
Is it legitimate to track down a library maintainer who has disappeared? [closed]
There's a public FOSS library available online, which has not seen any commits by its author for about 3 years. 2 years ago the maintainer added a README.md comment saying he's sorry for being ...
- 2,808
4 votes
4 answers
620 views
Is it ethical for an android application to check if its rival application is also installed by the user?
I was just going through a food delivery application's preferences file where I found that it had a boolean to check if the user has one of its rival's app installed or not. Is it ethical to do so on ...
- 61
6 votes
3 answers
1k views
Is it ethical to adopt other programmer's algorithms?
Imagine I find a completely new algorithm to compute the square root of a binary number (simplification of real scenario) on an internet forum that was an original creation. Is it ethical for me to ...
- 191
46 votes
8 answers
7k views
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 ...
3 votes
1 answer
307 views
Is it safe to use old code in a new project? [duplicate]
Here is the situation: While working by company A on project A you developed a very fast and perfect search algorithm. Then you switched to company B to work on project B which is totally different ...
- 141
2 votes
1 answer
211 views
Is it fair to patent workarounds? [closed]
While developing a FAT32 driver for my bootloader, I thought to make it complete by adding the long file name support. While watching around for some specification, and I also found articles about ...
- 129
3 votes
1 answer
280 views
Zero Day Exploit Ethics/Etiquette [duplicate]
What are my responsibilities, as a developer, if I stumble upon a zero day exploit in a widely used third party piece of software? Should the developer only tell the third party to limit the affect? ...
- 39