Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 Ethics
1. PUBLIC - Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest.
2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER - Software engineers shall act in a manner that is in the
best interests of their client and employer consistent with the public interest.
3. PRODUCT - Software engineers shall ensure that their products and related
modifications meet the highest professional standards possible.
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promote an ethical approach to the management of software development and
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maintenance.
6. PROFESSION
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- Software engineers shall advance the integrity and reputation of
the profession consistent with the public interest.
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7. COLLEAGUES - Software engineers shall be fair to and supportive of their
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colleagues.
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the profession.
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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational
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and scientific computing society. It has its own Code of Ethics and another set of
ethical principles that were also approved by the IEEE as the standard for teaching
and practicing software engineering.
* Avoid harm to others. Computer systems have an indirect impact on third parties.
They can cause loss of information and resources that might result severely harmful
for users, the general public, or employers. Therefore, software developers should
minimize the risk of harming others due to coding errors, or security issues, by
following standards to design and test systems
* Give proper credit for intellectual property. It is mandatory for every software
developer to never use and take credit for someone else’s work, even when it has
not been protected by a copyright law, patent, etc. They must recognize and fully
credit other people’s works, and they should use their own ideas to develop
software.
* Respect the privacy of others. Computer systems are wrongly used by some
people to violate the privacy of others. Software developers should write programs
that can protect users’ private information and that can avoid other undesired
people to have unauthorized access to.
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programmer must keep secret any additional information related to his or her
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employer that arises from working in a project.
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* Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief it is safe and meets
specifications. Programmers cannot assume that a system is ready to use only
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because it performs the tasks needed. They should make sure these systems are
also safe and meet every specification required by the user. If programs are not
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safe, users are unprotected from hackers that could steal important information or
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* Accept full responsibility for their own work. If a program presents errors, the
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software developer should accept full responsibility for his or her work, and should
work on revising, correcting, modifying, and testing it.
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* Identify, define, and address ethical, economic, cultural, legal and environmental
issues related to work projects. If a programmer notices and identifies that
working on a project will lead to any kind of problems, then the programmer should
report it to his or her employer before continuing.
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issues, or simply because they want to obtain easy money taking advantage of their
knowledge about how computer systems work. This guideline prohibits programmer
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to form part of such unlawful actions.
Computer systems get old and limited by new ones and new devices. Programmers
should “further their knowledge of developments in the analysis,
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documents”
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What happens when you purchase a specific software application? And if you’ve
purchased software, what is the license agreement for? Do you now own the
software because you paid for it?
Simply put, no. Though you may have paid for the software, what you have actually
done is licensed the application, essentially paying for the rights to use the software
according to guidelines determined by the owner. The owner of the software
remains the person or entity that holds the copyright, giving them the sole legal
authority power to sell, distribute, copy and/or change the content of the software.
And unless the person or organization transfers ownership rights, the rights remain
with the owner no matter how many times the owner legally distributes the
software.
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When a user either purchases software or freely downloads software from the
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Internet, the user is not buying the ownership rights to the software but a license
to use the software according to the licensing agreement, or EULA (for end user
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licensing agreement). The EULA is a legal agreement between the two parties and
is legally actionable if either party violates the terms of the agreement. While no
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two EULAs are exactly the same.
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It’s a good idea to actually read all the way through the licensing agreements of
software you buy or download. One way that spyware has been able to proliferate
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over the Internet is by individuals not paying attention to the licensing agreements
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that state that along with the intended software the program will also be installing
spyware on your system.
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1) Load the software into your computer's temporary memory by running the
program from a floppy disk, hard disk, CD-ROM, or other storage media;
2) Copy the software onto other media such as a floppy disk or your computer's
hard disk;
3) Run the program on your computer from a network server on which the
software is resident or stored.
The Data Protection Act 1998 controls the way that companies, organizations and
individuals handle personal data.
It states that:
1. Data may only be used for the specific purposes for which it was collected.
2. Data must not be disclosed to other parties without the consent of the
individual whom it is about, unless there is legislation or other overriding
legitimate reason to share the information (for example, the prevention or
detection of crime). It is an offence for Other Parties to obtain this personal
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data without authorization.
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3. Individuals have a right of access to the information held about them, subject
to certain exceptions (for example, information held for the prevention or
detection of crime).
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4. Personal information may be kept for no longer than is necessary and must
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be kept up to date.
5. Personal information may not be sent outside the European Economic Area
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with them from being revealed in court.
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Free software foundation (FSF)
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Free software developers guarantee everyone equal rights to their programs;
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any user can study the source code, modify it, and share the program. By
contrast, most software carries fine print that denies users these basic rights,
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The FSF provides critical infrastructure and funding for theGNU project,
the foundation of the popular GNU/Linux family of free operating systems
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Shareware
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Most shareware is delivered free of charge for trial basis e.g. 30 days, but the
author usually requests that you pay a small fee if you like the program and use
it regularly. By sending the small fee, you become registered with the producer
so that you can receive service assistance and updates. You can copy shareware
and pass it along to friends and colleagues, but they too are expected to pay a
fee if they use the product.
Commercial software