How to Deal With Stolen Code?

greenrom writes "I work for a small company as a software developer. While investigating a bug in one of our products, I found source code on a website that was nearly identical to code used in our product. Even the comments were the same. It's obvious that a developer at our company found some useful code on the web and copied it. The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code. It's just 200 lines of code the author posted in a forum. Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license? If not, what's the best way to deal with this kind of situation? Since I'm now the only person working on this code, there's no practical way to report the situation confidentially. I'm new to the company, and the developer who copied the code is the project lead. Reporting him to management doesn't seem like a good career move. I could rewrite the copied code without reporting him, but since the product is very close to release it would be difficult to make a significant change without providing some justification."

Comments

Haha!

[edmunz]

Tickle my butt!

Re:Uhhhhh

[DM9290]

"To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done. In my experience I avoid taking on employees like that because they seem more focused on making sure everyone else follows their ethics than in doing a good job on the task at hand."

Thats the problem with hiring ethical employees. They always seem to think that ethics are rules to live your life by, even at work!

If you want to hire people with no scruples go ahead, but when they start stealing or embezzling from you, lying in their progress reports, and fudging their Q&A testing don't be surprised. You might encourage employees to put morality aside in favor of doing a "good job", but don't assume that they are only going to waive ethics when it favours their boss, its going to be in favour of themselves first and foremost; they'll screw you just like anyone else. It is also a sign that you are going to screw them over at every opportunity. So you can kiss employee moral (loyalty) goodbye.