Ethics Concerns Draw Many Questions, Some Answers

I want to present another facet of today’s ethics. I work for a company that is a vendor to the astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and defense communities. I and my colleagues have seen a nearly total disregard for protecting a vendor’s proprietary information supplied with hardware, and even proprietary information supplied for a request for proposal (RFP).

For technical documentation and software, we require from our customers a license agreement that allows the proprietary information to be used for maintenance and archival purposes only. The information represents many person-years of company development and is at the heart of every product we build.

One university put our source code for our telescope control system on an unprotected website. Another university sent a section of our source code to a competitor asking if they could improve it. Another institution used our schematics to make a major change in the hardware so the customer could implement a competitor’s software under a different operating system.

A government laboratory passed on to another institution the part numbers from our drawings. Another government lab left complete documentation for a state-of-the-art scanner on a table next to the device in an unlocked and unattended room for six weeks; the documentation disappeared.

A government observatory used our proprietary drawings to make unauthorized wiring changes. After we reminded them that they had violated the terms of the license agreement, they made unauthorized changes a second time.

Recently, we responded to a university’s invitation to bid for a telescope. The invitation was replaced with an RFP that contained new specifications, including our carefully marked proprietary information from our initial response.

In most cases, the people responsible for divulging the proprietary information admitted they had never been briefed on the care and control of proprietary information and didn’t even know that their institution had signed an agreement.

There is more to ethics than was discussed in the November articles.