Question

What are the SEVEN Ethical dilemmas and the Analysis that are related to social, legal and ethical issues of the Open Source software.

You are expected to:

(i) Analyze these ethical dilemmas, evaluate their importance, research and understand the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders.

(ii) Provide divergent view when examining the ethical dilemmas from a perspective of a specific stakeholders .

(iii)Provide an analyze some of the debates that occurred among the stakeholders.

Answer 1

Solution: Some of the ethical dilemmas with the open-source software are:

• The software is actually available to all the people across the globe irrespective of the work they do and the use they need the software for. This issue is most commonly violated by hackers as well as the crackers all across the world as they can access this software unethically and misuse it the way they want to.
• Since the software is open-source, the developers and the designers of the product do not get enough credits as well as the money that they deserve for the efforts they have put into developing the product. This is because the software is free of cost to all the netizens across the globe and hence there are no profits in terms of money as well as royalty to the developers.
• The open source software community is also an important factor while developing and releasing a software to the people in an open-source method. This is because, there are lots of people that have a different set of mind and different opinions and hence when the user starts getting in touch with this community they are kind of confused which one to and which one not to.

From the perspective of the developers as well as the investors, it is very concerning thing as they need long term source of incomes and this is kind of not possible when they are working in the field of open-source software development at least the profit they earn in OSS is much less than what the organizations earn while selling their licensed versions of the software. From a user-point of view it has some serious defects when it comes to OSS as it does not make sure that the OSS is a safe place for the users as it can be misused by the people with malicious intent such as hackers and crackers.

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