This question is more on the ethics scale. I have two freelance php projects that are nearly identical to the point I can copy and paste and only change a few lines of code to be done with the 2nd job. Do you find yourself charging full price for a repeat? Do you half the two projects? I can't see charging for 10 minutes of work t...
My university is currently undergoing paid internship applications. Past terms have had a large number of positions available, but this term, as one might expect, there are not many positions available and the field has become very competitive. The web-app has every student upload an HTML formatted resume which is "Validated" server-sid...
I recently had a position at a small web development shop in the US where virtually all software used on a daily basis was cracked. My own IDE was paid for, and I used open source software personally while there, but I was still required to use MS Office and various Adobe products. For a myriad of reasons, I found a new job, but I'm cu...
Does ethics have anything to do with programming? Let's think analogously about a doctor. Does a doctor's job have anything to do with ethics? Well, I suppose even a sociopath can get the degree and perform their residency, but it is crucial that doctors do think about ethics. They need to know whether its OK to perform abortion, eut...
I have a serious question. I'm not trying to start a flamewar or to incite any violence--but here goes. Is it ever ethical to ignore the presence of a robots.txt file on a website? These are some of the considerations I've got in mind: 1.) If someone puts a web site up they're expecting some visits. Granted, web crawlers are using...
Is it ethical for a salaried developer to do "personal" or non job-related work on the job? For example, coding another website? What if it is during his/her break time? ...
I've been struggling with something at work that I'm not really in the mood to argue about with anyone who has a say in changing it so I wanted to seek some feedback on the issue from people here. We've gotten in the habit recently of checking the opt-in box on our forms that we build for clients. I'm not sure if it's always at the beh...
Part of our job is to be competent enough to make intelligent decisions pertaining to new technologies. How much time should be spent learning/researching versus implementing? ...
Is anyone aware of any legal precedents where the lack of unit testing in an application has lost someone a case Or where someone has not been deemed negligent despite a lack of unit testing in an application. Is there any highly regarded alternative to unit-testing that enables programmers to objectively demonstrate a committment to sof...
When working on a single project with a small team, say, 3 devs, its common for us to ask each other: "Oh, how does this class work?" or "What property do I set on this to make this happen?" as the code base grows, and of course, we must make use of the available APIs, classes, controls, et al. that we build. However, I'm sometimes uns...
This is a hypothetical scenario (ie: I just thought it up and I do not intend to do it!) What stops a company from preventing the effective use of a derivative GPL work by doing the following Fork the GPL project Make a derivative work Sell the derivative work and publish the source code in obfuscated form So technicly they have rel...
I have a client that is interested in having the homepage of their website look almost exactly like that of website ABC. They love everything about it. However, they either do not want to ask for or would not receive a license from ABC to copy their site. My question is: how closely can a website be copied without violating copyright. ...
I've come across a serious security flaw in one of the B2B web service providers that we operate on behalf a client. Essentially, one can upload and execute arbitrary code as administrator if they monkey with the parameters in the URL. Many other organizations also this service as well, so this flaw effects their security as well. Norma...
Software can have ethical implications in real life. One obvious example is the software that controls a military drone. A more subtle example is software that creates statistical reports for management about an employee's days off because of illness (that could be used to decide who will be fired). To what extent should a programmer be...
A lot of code comes with comments expressing a programmer's wishes. How do you deal with those wishes if they conflict with your job? ...
My project has some rather open-ended requirements in terms in file size limits and performance. In the end, the performance varies by platform and typically execution time is the only issue. Faster platform equals faster execution. Our business guy says we should find our current maximum capability, make sure we exceed the previous lega...
I recently joined TopCoder and have been solving a few problems on the site. Now, I want to publicly post my solutions onto my blog and have others go over it, suggest improvements, better design, etc. wherever applicable. Would this be ethical? ...
I have been doing consulting for a customer at a low hourly rate with the purpose of building a long term business relationship. The work consisted in learning, maintaining and modifying a big code base. Part of the reason I charged a low rate was to amortize over time the cost of learning the code. I have been working for this customer...
First bit of the question: What are the legal requirements of LGPL code during the deployment of a commercial product? Software package should include LGPL licence file Anything else? Shall we add a line to our "software agreement text" where you need to click next in the installer ? Second bit, Is there any known / accepted ways of...
3 years ago I did a security audit for a large ecommerce website. When the audit was preformed I found several severe security issues that allow for access to data that should not be accessible after a transaction is completed. On this site there are several major risks. First you can see orders coming through the system real time; all t...