[throwaway234970]

Also posting as a throwaway for similar reasons.

This comment brings up a valid point. When I was working in academia, a lab from $large_and_famous_west_coast_university copied some code from a set of open source scripts from another lab in my field on Github, erased the Git history, and then created a new repo with a footnote in passing that they had been "inspired" by the original scripts- pretty much a textbook case of plagiarism. No one involved was Chinese (most were actually white male Europeans).

In general, high profile researchers take incredibly morally repugnant / unethical actions to get ahead.

[rellui]

It's "Open source". That's the whole point of open sourcing code. As long as the lab attached the license provided it's good. This is completely different than copying code from private internal repositories.

[throwaway234970]

You're missing the point / haven't read my other comment- in the context of academia plagiarism amounts to stealing. Sure, there's nothing that's legally preventing you from copying code and passing it off as your own so long as the license is preserved, but in academia this has political and sometimes economic ramifications.

[philipodonnell]

Not using a throwaway but isn't there a difference between forking a public Github repository without attribution and stealing industrial secrets encrypted into photographs?

[throwaway234970]

Yes, there is a difference, but that's because academia is not industry. Since academia's main goal is to publicize findings rather than keep them secret, plagiarism is the academic analogue of stealing "industrial secrets" and then giving them to a competitor (i.e., increasing the prestige of a rival university).

The overall effect is comparable, even if the currency (reputation instead of money) is different, and the decision to steal is still rooted in the same sense of ethics / morality.

[throwaway234970]

As an addendum, it should be noted that reputation and money are not unrelated, and that when stealing ideas from other labs and taking credit for them, scientists are effectively putting on a false show for funders that can increase their ability to get grants.