15 Common Types of Unethical Behavior Found in Open-Source Projects

Through an analysis of 316 GitHub problems across 842 repositories, this study investigates unethical behavior in open-source software (OSS) projects. We find 15 different categories of unethical behavior mapped to 11 ethical guidelines using keyword-based thematic analysis. These include copyright violations (plagiarism, soft forking, and missing attribution), licensing abuse, self-promotion, privacy violations, offensive language, and unmaintained paid services.