2.02. Not knowingly use software that is obtained or retained either illegally or unethically.
In Sri Lanka this is a huge problem for most of the Freelance developers because they don’t have the capital to invest in software licenses. Because of that most of the developers tend to go for open source alternatives or in some cases cracked software. But if you are following the ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics it clearly says that you should not knowingly use software that is obtained illegally or unethically. The infringement of this code occurs only if the person who is using the software knows that it is illegally taken, which is the case in the use of most cracked software.
As developers of the website of Rotaract Club of University of Colombo, Faculty of Science we also had to face such situations. Because some of the plugins that we needed to integrate were not freely available. So the option we took is going for the freely available alternative tools. But some of the alternatives doesn’t give the full functionality that we needed which were there in the paid tools. So to overcome that issue in some plugins we had to write our own code to do the additional functionality and in some cases by integrating some other free tools we were able to get the work done.
Going to the open source versions led to more flexible integration of tools which made the tools more custom tailored. One other advantage that we saw in the free tools is that as some of the tools are really light weight we were able to improve the performance of the web site. Because as we found out some of the paid tools were relatively slow due to the variant of functionality that comes integrated with them, some of them which we didn’t need. So by selecting a specific tool that only does the job that we need we were able to improve the performance of the site as well.
This is how we addressed the ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics rule number 2.02 , by going for free alternatives.
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