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10 votes

Software License which discriminates on 'ethical' grounds

I work for a company with a mandate to develop software products for progressive charities. We created some libraries that we wanted to open source and, like the OP, we weren’t satisfied with the ...
ChrisJ's user avatar
  • 289
8 votes
Accepted

Question about ethical auto-updates

I see only one ethical aspect here: when you (or your company) abuse the silent auto-update feature to change a "harmless" application into a malicious one, which first establishes a large ...
Doc Brown's user avatar
  • 214k
4 votes

Is it legitimate to track down a library maintainer who has disappeared?

Their priorities in life have changed, apparently. They might have found a job that makes a huge amount of money but takes 50 hours a week. They won’t be interested in maintaining an old project. Or ...
gnasher729's user avatar
  • 47.5k
4 votes

Is it ethical for an android application to check if its rival application is also installed by the user?

It seems that the security of the operating system is broken. An app should not be able to find out what other applications are running on your device.
gnasher729's user avatar
  • 47.5k
4 votes
Accepted

Is it ethical for an android application to check if its rival application is also installed by the user?

It really depends on what they do with that information. If they purely use it to have a statistic "X% of our users also have the app from competitor Y installed" then I don't see anything wrong with ...
Michael Borgwardt's user avatar
3 votes

Question about ethical auto-updates

If your application needs to be up-to-date, then I don't see why an auto-update feature would necessarily be problematic. I use several applications with different types of automatic update ...
Thomas Owens's user avatar
  • 84.2k
3 votes

Designing a Distributed System for Indigenous Data Sovereignty Across Nations

Here is a technology of the 80's that could be applied to the task: usenet Let there be a community of servers, with indigenous roots or otherwise, that agree to gossip with one another, flooding ...
J_H's user avatar
  • 7,605
3 votes
Accepted

Is using Microsoft Hooks an ethical process for getting non sensitive Information

Microsoft Windows is built around hooks. Most of them are hidden behind their api but once your application becomes anything more then trivial you can't get around using hooks once in a while. It's ...
Pieter B's user avatar
  • 13.3k
2 votes

Directly copying third-party API

As of Nov 2019, the Oracle vs. Google case has reached the Supreme Court. Oracle is in the driver's seat, having won at Federal appeals court level. In reading through various articles, it looks ...
Jeff Brower's user avatar
1 vote

Question about ethical auto-updates

A forced auto-update is a can of worms. Already some users pointed out the security risk, but that is not the only problem. You have no idea of what is the situation on the device when the app is ...
FluidCode's user avatar
  • 791
1 vote

Question about ethical auto-updates

It depends. One one hand, as a user, I am happy with modern browsers self updating automatically and fixing security breaches and privacy leaks. One the other hand, as a developer, I need to fully ...
mouviciel's user avatar
  • 15.5k
1 vote

Question about ethical auto-updates

TL;DR: The one thing that you can't ethically do is update the app "behind the user's back". There are a few things to consider apart from ethics, which probably help to clarify which kind ...
Hans-Martin Mosner's user avatar
1 vote

Confusion about dual license (MIT/GPL) javascript for use on my website

I know this is an old question, but I want to answer the third part of the question more emphatically: My partner thinks I should remove the copyright altogether and change the variable names, as ...
Jamey Hicks's user avatar

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