15 Common Types of Unethical Behavior Found in Open-Source Projects

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/15-common-types-of-unethical-behavior-found-in-open-source-projects . A groundbreaking study finds 15 different forms of unethical behavior in open source software, ranging from plagiarism to poorly maintained commercial apps. Check more stories related to programming at: https://hackernoon.com/c/programming . You can also check exclusive content about #open-source-software-ethics , #oss-unethical-behavior , #software-engineering-ethics , #license-violation , #plagiarism-in-software , #oss-taxonomy , #plagiarism-in-open-source , #github-self-promotion , and more. This story was written by: @escholar . Learn more about this writer by checking @escholar's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com . Through an analysis of 316 GitHub problems across 842 repositories, this study investigates unethical behavior in open-source software (OSS) projects. We find 15 different categories of unethical behavior mapped to 11 ethical guidelines using keyword-based thematic analysis. These include copyright violations (plagiarism, soft forking, and missing attribution), licensing abuse, self-promotion, privacy violations, offensive language, and unmaintained paid services.