Is it ethical (legally allowed) to publish X-ray diffraction spectra in a scholarly article if the data analysis was performed using an hacked version of High-score software?
I’m not a lawyer, know nothing about this software, and haven’t written software for sale, so take this for what it may be worth. I did publish an R package (freeware) which I wrote on my own dime. If I were selling my package and someone had stolen it, I would not be happy. It seems that you are a bit uneasy with this, and I think that’s for good reason. It is certainly unethical, and I assume illegal, to steal software. It may be possible for the company which wrote this software to pursue this if you published the analysis, although I doubt that they would. Since you are publishing the results, and this is not a standard statistical procedure that could be done with many packages, you may be obligated to state what High-score software (i.e. company) was used. It may make assumptions and use statistical procedures that need to be explained. I would suggest buying the software (which may well be very expensive), or find a consultant who has it and can redo the analysis, the results of which you seem to know already.
Hi Abdelhak Belkadi,
I'm glad that you are interested in using our Highscore SW. We provide a time-limited trial version, free of charge, for university researchers. Please feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to obtain an official license key for your work.
Best regards,
Zhaohui (product manager Empyrean, Malvern Panalytical).
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