Ethics 101: To re-use or not to re-use?

[Alan Anderson]

The intent of the rule is obviously to try to put software on the same sort of footing as hardware. This is not an easy thing to do well, for a number of reasons, but prohibiting reuse of code developed before kickoff is pretty close to prohibiting reuse of mechanisms assembled before kickoff.

Copy and paste of last year's code is too close to pulling a spare assembly from last year off the shelf. Retyping the code, line for line, is very much like fabricating an exact duplicate of a mechanism from last year's plans. The code design can certainly be reused without breaking the rules, and I think running the actual code through a student's eyes and fingers on the way to being compiled is a very good way to expose him or her to the design of the software.


I haven't given it a great deal of thought yet, but there could well be a legitimate way to reuse the exact .c and .h files from a previous year's software project. If you make it readily available to everyone, you could probably make a good case for treating it as an "off the shelf component". That's approximately what happens with the code so helpfully provided by Kevin Watson. But unless you're also willing to support such code, I wouldn't suggest making yourself a test case.