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

23/09/2025 14 min
15 Common Types of Unethical Behavior Found in Open-Source Projects

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Episode Synopsis



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.


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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.


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