1.) Work in progress!
2.) The topic I chose to talk about this week is kindof in the middle from last week's topic an today's. It's about code plagiarism.
The case I chose to represent this was the (almost) recall of Word 2007 a few years back when it was discovered the dev team used stolen code to encode documents in XML, as well as read and create XML documents. This is of course a copyright issue with the code, but it also has a place in workplace ethics. The programmers "created" code, and put it into the final product, when the code wasn't actually theirs. This is, in my opinion, a good example of bad workplace ethics.
Links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/6874126/Microsoft-ordered-to-stop-selling-Word-2007-in-US.html
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/22/judge-orders-microsoft-to-stop-selling-office-by-january-11th/
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-08-12-microsoft-lawsuit_N.htm
Theft is what itsounds like. Copyrights and patents are there to protect the creators from infringement. If no protection, then why bother?
ReplyDeleteThis is just wrong, you dont do this because of the workplace ethics. I think they should have just recalled the product.
ReplyDeletei think it is nothing more than theft. one of the developers must have had the bright idea to take a nice little short cut and they got caught big time.
ReplyDeleteim not sure what all goes into programming of that extent, in my experience theres not a whole lot of ways to do anything, but if they copied pages of copyrighted programming verbatim, then yes its theft, i guess microsoft got away with it because its microsoft
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