First, consider the typical rules around cheating and plagiarism. In this assignment, you are encouraged to work within the set of best practices natural to open source development. Open source developers do not write from scratch what already exists and is freely available for use. You too should be thinking in terms or code reuse. It is ok for you to use code from other open source projects, so long as the license is amenable to the use.

Third, consider the sharp dividing line between student projects in most programming courses. For the most part, you are being evaluated on your ability to do a particular project or to solve a particular problem. Your outcome is measured against your peers’. However, in this course you are not in competition with your peers; rather, you are all working on one large project (i.e., Mozilla) with many sub-projects within it. As a result, there is no clean line to divide your work from that of your peers, your work from that of the Mozilla community. This means that collaboration with each other and even with other members of the Mozilla community is acceptable practice.