Can post a code but afraid of plagiarism

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 20 Jan 2014 18:39:44 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:

> But sometimes different skills are being examined, and the student
> should be exercising skills on their own without basing it directly on
> the work of others. In these cases, penalties for plagiarism are
> appropriate, would you agree?

How can anyone possibly agree without knowing what those penalties are, 
what the definition of plagiarism being used is, and how guilt or 
innocence is determined?

According to some people in a much better position to judge, significant 
parts of academia has collectively gone mad over so-called plagiarism.

    "I started off researching the subject of plagiarism thinking that
    sensitivity on the issue was getting a little bit out of hand. What
    I found when I viewed actual guidelines and articles on the subject
    was just plain appalling. Academia has simply gone crazy on this
    subject; not figuratively crazy, but certifiably, clinically,
    sociopathically insane. I'm talking delusional, loss of contact 
    with reality insanity."
    -- Professor Steven Dutch, University of Wisconsin

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PlagShame.HTM

More here:

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PlagiarNonsense.HTM

According to Dutch, the University of Phoenix academic guidelines 
includes *failing to give a page number* of an otherwise fully cited 
source as plagiarism.

If you read nothing else, read the second link, as Dutch gives practical 
guidelines for distinguishing significant and unethical plagiarism from 
insignificant and normal borrowing and sharing.


Let's take this word of advice from "Plagiarism Today":

   [quote]
   In the end, it comes down to the same tried and true system of 
   always attributing any content that you use, no matter how small, 
   and always showing respect for the words of others, even if you 
   have permission to use them.
   [end quote]

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/02/20/the-obama-plagiarism-scandal/


Do you notice the assumption made? Let me highlight it for you:

   THE WORDS OF OTHERS


The hidden assumption here is that *words are property*, that they belong 
to whomever first publishes them. Having now written those few words, 
nobody else is permitted to use those same words in the same order 
without crediting me. Failure to credit me is a sin of the highest order, 
enough to get you kicked out of your university, your name blackened. 
Unless, of course, somebody else wrote those words before me, in which 
case *my ignorance* of that earlier usage does not diminish the magnitude 
of my sin. In that regard, plagiarism is rather like patent infringement.

This attitude is part of the compartmentalisation of culture into walled 
gardens, where nothing can be done without the permission of the 
"intellectual property owner". This is dangerous enough when it comes to 
ordinary, regular language, but it is astonishingly harmful if applied to 
code. It goes against the principles of openness and freedom which the 
FOSS movement stands for.

Code, for the most part, is extremely cliched. Very little code is 
original, and none of it is created in isolation. There are only so many 
ways to walk a list, or search a body of text for a word, or calculate 
the cosine of a float. You sometimes have the option of shuffling the 
order of operations around a bit, or changing variable names, or slight 
modifications of some algorithm. As a community, programmers may not 
always share code, but they share ideas, coding idioms and algorithms. 
The academic definition of plagiarism, if applied in its full and 
strictest form, would essentially make coding impossible.

We do not know how strict the OP's college is about so-called plagiarism, 
whether they only intend to come down on outright copying of significant 
bodies of code, or whether they have a tendency to go after trivial 
borrowing of simple idioms or minor duplication of insignificant portions 
of the program. (If I walk a linked list using mynode = mynode.next, and 
you use the same variable names, is that an indication of copying?) 
Without knowing what the OP's college considers plagiarism, how can judge 
the OP's reaction to it?



-- 
Steven