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If your advisor has collaborators who are going to attempt to steal your work, you have much, much bigger problems than what’s in your source code.The novelty of your thesis is in the ideas. The code is merely a way of testing those ideas. It’s similar to an experimental thesis in physics. Showing someone the lab apparatus you are using isn’t nearly as important as discussing the ideas that the apparatus is designed to test.Since your advisor has presumably already discussed the ideas, if the collaborator is going to steal your ideas, they already likely know enough to do that if they know enough to want your code.Much more likely, assuming your advisor isn’t a naive idiot, they will build on your code to expand the larger system in some way. (This could be by writing more code, by running some experiments in another area, or doing something else that is out of scope of what you are doing.) That’s going to be good for you in that they will then publish papers, possibly with you as a co-author, which will bring more attention to your system and your work.As others have noted, there may also be intellectual property (IP) questions. If you are in the US, there’s a relatively good chance that you don’t own the IP anyway, in which case it doesn’t matter. If you do, it’s worth having a brief discussion with someone who knows about IP only if you believe the ideas are such that you might be interested in forming a company or otherwise licensing the IP in the future. (In particular, for patents, in the US, public disclosure is an issue. However, if done properly, you will be able to argue that giving code to a collaborator with restrictions on redistribution is not public disclosure.) In any other case, more exposure is better.In any case, I’d be tempted, when sending the code and with the agreement of your advisor, to send a “cover letter” that tells them where to get the code and also that states the purposes for which you are providing them the code (e.g. to extend and perform other experiments in the context of the collaboration being performed). My goal there would be less legal and more simply to make sure that everyone has a common understanding of the collaboration. The idea is to avoid bad feelings if the collaborators believe, for example, that you are generally releasing the code when you have the intent to share it only with them.Edited to add: I’ve gotten several comments suggesting ways that one can protect the intellectual property, particularly as embodied in the code. Let me suggest that people with that point of view write answers. A careful read of my answer will show that my belief is that the code itself is probably of low value and that the ideas may have more value, but the value to a grad student is in dissemination. Beyond that, if this question is from the rare grad student with an immediately businessworthy idea, the advisor has probably already messed up any possible patent or similar IP claims. So, overall, annoying the advisor by getting a lawyer or claiming trade secret status or other approaches is likely to annoy someone with great power while bringing no benefit at all.

Throughout the history there have been a myriad of hackers which the world has (or has not ) seen ;). I will not focus on pointing out the milestones he covered but his badass way of hacking.I have read a number of novels focussed on the lives of the best hackers ever walked the planet, but the one seemingly famous (or infamous) hacker that caught my eye is none other than - KEVIN MITNICK.He was accused of software theft, wire fraud, damage to the computers of the University of Southern California, theft of files and interception of emails. Among the affected companies included Nokia, Fujitsu, NEC, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Apple and other tech giants.Here my few personal favorite abstracts from his book - “Ghost in the wires” (clipped to avoid the sloppy details).Federal prosecutor in court: he told Magistrate Tassopulos that I could start a nuclear holocaust. “He can whistle into a telephone and launch a nuclear missile from NORAD,”He found details of a person who crossed him on the road in five minutes.I had been cut off by a guy driving a BMW. Busy talking on his cell phone, he had suddenly switched lanes, swerving within inches of my car, scaring the crap out of me. I’d grabbed my cell phone and made one of my pretexting calls to the DMV, running the BMW’s license plate and getting the owner’s name and address. Then I called an internal department at PacTel Cellular, gave the guy’s name and address. The lady gave me his cell phone number, and hardly more than five minutes after the jerk had cut me off, I called and got him on the phone. I shouted, “Hey, you f***ing dick, I’m the guy you f***ing cut off five minutes ago and almost killed us both. I’m from the DMV, and if you pull one more stunt like that, we’re going to cancel your driver’s license!”He’d known not only that he was going to be raided, but exactly when.The next morning, around 6:00 a.m., I woke up, alarmed. Was this somebody trying to break in? I shouted, “Who’s there?”. “FBI—open up!” , I answered the door, not even realizing I was stark naked. At the front of the pack was a lady agent, who couldn’t keep herself from glancing down. They shook down the place while I got dressed, even thoroughly inspecting the contents of the fridge. On the door of the fridge, IScotch-taped a note: “FBI doughnuts.” On the box, in large letters, wrote: FBI DOUGHNUTS. No one commented or cracked a smile at my “FBI doughnuts” sign, and the entire dozen went untouched.To avoid any unwanted attention, on his resume he never showed more than 90% of the required skills.I created a separate résumé for each likely-sounding ad, tailored to the particular qualifications listed. As a rule, I’d tailor a résumé that showed I had around 90 percent of the skills on the company’s wish list. If I claimed every sought-after skill, I figured the HR people or the head of IT might wonder, If he’s that good, why is he applying for such a low-level job?The sole reason why I really honor this guy over the rest of the hackers is becauseHe never had any malevolent intentions of committing fraud, each hack was his priceless trophy, his priceless prize.On the end of his supervised release with Steve Woznaik (co-founder Apple)-Source - Ghost In The Wires and Google Images.

This behavior is very dangerous to your employer, and you could be fired.The problem is on several levels. First, some open source licenses are viral, and second, you are probably violating the terms of the open source license, and therefore you may be in breach of copyright law.The one situation in which this behavior is harmless is if the code from which you are “copy-pasting” is in the public domain. Public domain works are those whose copyright has expired (good luck finding source code written prior to the 1930s), or those whose copyright holders have released it into the public domain. In this case, the work is not covered by copyright law. It is still wise to leave a comment in the code saying where you copied the code from, as this will be useful for future maintainers (you can pick up future bug fixes) and future lawyers (they can verify the public domain status). Be careful not to claim that your company owns the copyright on the public domain code.A license like the GPL requires that you only use GPL code within other GPL code. This means that by copy-pasting their open-source code into yours, you are agreeing to make your entire program open source as well. There are (difficult) techniques for discovering whether this has been done, even on compiled binaries, so there is a chance you will be caught. And if they do catch you, they can either compel your company to give away all their source code, or find you in breach of copyright law.Similarly, if the code you copied has a license agreement including language like “to use this code, you must retain this copyright notice verbatim,” or, “to use this code, you must include a credit to John Doe in your documentation,” then you must meet those terms. If you fail to do so, you are in breach of copyright law.Copyright law violations can be very expensive. The law provides penalties of $200-$150,000 in the USA per infringement, and infringers are generally required to pay actual damages and profits plus all legal costs. Plus, the infringer is usually required to immediately stop using the infringing work. This can easily put a company out of business.Open source software can usually be used, but it is important to know the rules and to follow them carefully. If you break those rules, you can put your company’s existence at risk. The rules are usually not onerous, so take the time to learn and follow them. Each open source package should have a license agreement somewhere telling you what the rules are. Read it!