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Open Source vs. Academic Dishonesty?
Raul654 asks: "My university has a very vague Academic dishonesty policy. I have a small webpage with some code I have written (mostly C/C++ and Verilog), GPL of course. Someone warned me, rightfully so, that I might be in violation of the policy. Long story short, I have an appointment with Judicial Affairs in a few days (my doing), and I want to go in there with some persuasive arguments for why I shouldn't have to pull the page." The problem here is that the code on his webpage is code from previous programming projects. It basically boils down to the tradeoff of a student who feels pround about his work and a professor who doesn't want to interfere with the lesson plan he probably worked hard to produce. How do you feel about this?
I agree with you that legally, I am entitled to publish this material. I know that one overzealous computer science professor actually makes his students sign contracts that give legal ownership of their code to him to prevent just this.
But by the same token, is the university not entitled to come after me for suborning plagurism. That is basically the crux of their arguement, that I am giving students the capability to cheat. So their arguement would be that yes, I can publish it yes, but it has reprocussions.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Bah! So do text books.
I know that one overzealous computer science professor actually makes his students sign contracts that give legal ownership of their code to him to prevent just this.
And I believe that would not be a legal contract. They tried to do that at my university. The school was sued and they lost. It is no longer the policy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This is actually something I'm very interested in doing if I can find the right situation, partners, funding and such. The concept is to set up a non-profit that can help establish open-ended project lab courses using the faculty and facilities of the institution. Industry connections would be good as well, but ideally it would be to commercially apply the Open Source project work. I'm thinking as much about Open Hardware, but any real project is always multi-disciplinary anyway. Hardware, docs, software, supporting web-sites, etc.
The biggest problem with school programming projects is, as you said, they are too trivial. I worked full time for two years before going back to finish my B.S., so when I went back, I had a much better apreciation for the problems of "programming in the large". Several hundred or even a thousand lines of code just don't give you enough complexity to see what the real problems are. Also, in the real world, you rarely are starting something from scratch, which is also a good feature of working on Open Source projects (large existing code base to modify/extend).
...all your code on the page is, as you pointed out, GPL. That means I (or anyone else) can download it and use it under the terms of GPL, if we so choose.
And once we download it and use it in our projects (which might be nothing more than an example of good code written by students), as long as we do so under the terms of the GPL, if we so choose.
And, while I have not read the GPL recently, it seems to me, I, or anyone else here, could download the code, use it as an example of good code written by a student on a website we have created to share with students and teachers. Which means while the University may not let YOU publish it (I don't see how they can do that -- there's this picky thing called the 1st Amendment and they can't take that away -- see pervious comments in other threads about coercion), any of us could publish it on a web page, under the terms of the GPL, if we so choose.
At least that's my thoughts. I would have the right to publish your code on a web page, because I have no connection to the University. I have the right to publish my own code on a web page. Why should you have less rights to publish that material than I do?
At least that's my take on it.
Your prof might just have to look more closely at student projects to make sure it isn't copied.