On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 6:21:37 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Mon, 20 Jan 2014 19:17:35 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> > indar kumar writes: > >> Hint would have been enough but I was strictly discouraged. > > You asked for private help, specifically to subvert the rules against > > plagiarism you're subject to. > > So no, I don't believe this modification of your request to be sincere. > > You asked for help cheating, and you were refused. Please take a hint, > > and do your assignment under the terms your teacher has set. > That is the harshest, least "good faith" interpretation of the OP's post > I have ever read. It doesn't look to me like that attitude is intended to > be welcoming to students who are trying to walk the narrow tightrope of > being part of a community of programmers who value sharing and > collaboration while avoiding running foul of overly strict academic rules > about so-called plagiarism. I was working in a large sw-development company some years ago. One day unexpectedly I found I could not download any more the FOSS sw I regularly use. What happened?? Evidently a programmer had copied GPL code off the net, passed it off as his own, it had gone past the local company'a managers and been detected by the off-shore client-company. Evidently a dose of GPLd code is as salutary for the health of commercial sw companies as a polonium capsule is for humans. Hence the chaos. So treating Ben's strictures as *purely* academic is at least as harsh as the strictures themselves IOW plagiarism is not about some kind of morality but about following some rules -- which are usually quite arbitrary. Heck even different free licenses quarrel about what constitutes right and wrong. And as a consequence of all this, courses and entire degrees in IP are becoming fashionable -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
