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Is it ethical for a professor to get masters students to work on open source modules related to the professor's profit-making company?
My professor of Computer Science has a company (both based in Germany) that promotes an open-source software. Of course the software is free and open-source, but his company generates profits through support, training, etc. and they have a server-version of the software which is commercial and very expensive. The software is very modular, and the area of the software's specialty is growing quickly. So the company needs to implement a lot of modules for it. Each module is a separate algorithm. So what my professor is doing is basically the following:

Master students come to him asking for master thesis.
He assigns them to build algorithmic modules for the open-source software.
The student gets well trained in the software because of that.
The professor later offers the student to work in his company since he is now highly proficient in the software.

Of course the student gains substantial knowledge, so there is no problem in that aspect. However,
is it ethical that he is growing his commercial business using his professorship position?
Addendum:

My problem is that I believe he is assigning the thesis topics based on what his company needs, not based on what is good for research. I personally believe that professors are given those chairs to advance research. If they are concerned about money, then there is a place called "industry" to make money. I'm not saying that it's wrong to get money by working in academia, rather, what I'm saying that working in academia means doing everything for the sake of improving academia and research, not for other agendas.
In response to the argument "He didn't force it, so just pick a different advisor". Well my problem is that he is the professor that does the research in the field that I like. Other professors all work on different fields. So I might be interested in working on state of the art research or so in his area, but rather he would offer me a topic suitable for his company, then he says I only have these thesis topics. If I didn't like them because I don't like the area of topics that his company needs, then I would be left without any interesting topics. That would be unfair to me, since all other professors work on different fields. So if his focus wasn't promoting the software of his company, then he might find better topics that promote research and science. This is one of my problems with him.
Masters students fund themselves during their studies in Germany, so we get no funding at all. The problem is that when you do your master project and master thesis in our university, there is no predefined deadline for it. This is because it is assumed that you don't know what you want to do for your thesis. You go to the professor and he gives you a topic to work on. But he never tells you what your contribution is or anything else. So basically you have to do "research" to find contributions, i.e. you need to contribute to the state-of-the-art in this topic somehow. Basically you spend almost 5 months just reading papers to find out finally what you want to do. Now because of this, then you can't put a deadline for the thesis, since you don't know what to do! Once you know what to do, then you go and register your thesis and you then get a 6-month deadline, which you use 2 months to write the thesis and then submit. But you never register until you know what you want to do, otherwise it is very risky because you might fail the thesis defense! I don't want to make this much longer, but because of this procedure then professors are taking advantage of the students. So suppose that you go to this professor, then he will keep you working by saying (this is not enough yet for the thesis, we want to program algorithm X and Y as well). In this case the student is working on building this professor's company modules AND personally funding himself. Of course if the professor never says that this is enough, you will keep working... and working... and spending money on rent and so on...
I'm not doing my thesis at this professor's chair. Actually one of my friends did his thesis there and he finished much faster than me. I personally believe he was given a detailed plan to what to do so that is why he finished faster. He even did his master project there and I think it is the same topic/project. I spent nine months in another chair just for doing my master project, then switched to another chair for doing my thesis. It has been eleven months just working on my thesis and will soon finish the writing portion. So it took me almost two years just for working on my project and thesis and I didn't include the time for courses! Actually one of my friends because of this problem finished his masters in almost four years! I personally feel that I completed a PhD program not a masters! I actually can think about original research contributions because of the way I did my masters, but I doubt the students who do their thesis/projects at that professors will learn the same research mentality that I have now. But at the same time, it is good that they finished earlier than I did, because I'm from a poor country and I have been funding myself the entire time in a very expensive city. Sometimes I regret doing this master, because it really drained me. Every time I meet people and tell them that it is taking me this long to finish my master, I get very embarrassed. I also fear that because of taking this long, my chances will be lower when trying to find a job, because they will see that it took me so much time to finish the masters program. They will never understand that the system in our university for the masters is somehow different from others! So I probably think that doing a thesis at that professor's chair is a good idea to at least escape the misery that I went through!

Are the students funded? Where does the money come from? If he's funding students from business profits, then that's great. And/or if the students know about the business before starting, that's also fine. If the answer to both of those is negative, then... mutter mutter grumble grumble.

I don't really see the problem.

If: 1) the software done by the students is open-source. 2) students don't need to maintain legacy code they didn't make, they work on separate modules (possibly using but not maintaining or modifying legacy code) then I'd be happy to work there. And additionally there are career opportunities in an "area of speciality that is growing quickly". Yes, the area in the intersection university ∩ bussiness is grey as the intersection student ∩ employee, however, this is in the light-grey area, very light, I'd be happy.

For comparison. I'm working in a project, several partners, including universities and companies. A company has all the rights on the software (not open source) that is developed in the project (written by any partner) and a non-aggression contract with the partners. The project is funded by the EU.

@Trylks that'd be different in Germany. Even if you, as a person, sign a contract that literally says 'The code I write belongs to company X', that passage is void. See § 29 Abs. 1 UrhG. The only thing you can do is allow someone to use whatever you created. And even in that case the person using your work has to inform you about whatever he wants to do with your code. See § 31a UrhG. In response to Alex's question: What is the contractual binding between the students and that professor? Is it mentioned that the code will be commericalized?

I would recommend that you remove "p.s. i don't respect him anymore because of this behavior."  When you ask for someone's opinion, you'll get more valuable results if you don't telegraph what you want the answer to be.

The ethical concern I would have, which no answers have addressed yet, is the conflict of interest in the choice of thesis topic.  Is the professor suggesting a particular topic because it's of academic interest, a worthwhile experience, and a good fit for the student's abilities?  Or does he suggest it simply because it's a problem his company needs solved?  How is the student to know?  (There are counter-arguments: even on academic topics it's certainly possible for a professor to recommend a thesis topic mainly because it advances her own academic research.)

One could also argue that since the student has the ultimate decision whether to work on a topic proposed by the professor (and of interest to the company) or to look for a different advisor, the professor can propose anything he wants without ethical concerns.  I am not sure that I would agree with that point of view.

@NateEldredge - in some universities the thesis topics have to be approved by the department (or some board) before they are made available to the students. Don't know anything about German universities though.

So, anybody can contribute to this open source project, but some contributors will also get their master thesis done while doing so? And improve their programming skills? And potentially get a job offer afterwards? Would it made you happier if somebody else was the owner of this company?

Nobody mentioned so far that there are good students and not so good students. I doubt that ALL the code produced by the students is actually usable without any extra work. The professor doesn't know in advance what the result of the thesis will be, why should he pay for "a cat in a bag". Those students who demonstrate good results are offered a payed job after that. I see it as a sort of a technical interview that many employers conduct. 2) The students have to work on a project and write a thesis and they are normally not payed to do this. 3) The students can go to another adviser

@SteffenWinkler: (UrhG) in general it is not that easy for software (see §69b). But with a thesis the situation is even more complicated => I'll put this into an answer.

@cbeleites §69b says that if you write software for a company, the only person ('Juritische Person') to make money off of that is that company, unless it's specified differently in your contract. §29 Abs 1 and §31a are unaffected from that. At least that's what I get from that. And indeed it doesn't simplify the situation.

@SteffenWinkler: IANAL, but I don't see an "unbekannte Nutzungsart" (unknown kind of use). Also licensing is Nutzungsrecht and thus transferrable. My guess is that the confusion in the UrhG side discussion comes from differences between English/US copyright concepts and German/central european non-transferable authorship rights/Urheberrechte and transferable rights of (economic) use / Nutzungsrechte. All I wanted to express is that Trylks' situation is not a good example for the situation in the question as the relationship between code developer and company are completely different.

@cbeleites IANAL either. As for the rest of your comment: I've no clue what you are trying to say.

@SteffenWinkler let's sort out things in the chat http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/2496/academia ?

You said the modules are for the open-source project and there is nothing wrong with this.  Chances are is he is famous (and successful), teaching is his spin-off, not this company.  If he was having the students do the support/build modules for "his customers" only, then there might be an issue.
Open source gets improved, students get valuable training, job market improves, but "you don't respect him"?  Sounds like you have a personal problem with him and you're trying to find a way to justify it.

edited to remove the obvious flags for the expected answer, as suggested by Pete L Clark

@NateEldredge exactly that was really the point I wanted to address but couldn't really express it!!!

It's not really clear where the university enters into this arrangement, other than that it handles the prof's recruitment for him and reduces the labour costs by awarding a master's degree as the compensation that these programmers receive for doing contract-work at the prof's company. The appearance that, as described, this is not obviously an academic exercise in any sense other than that a qualification is awarded, might be affecting answers ;-) So if that's not a fair conclusion maybe this isn't a fair question...

In many countries, universities are allowed to have spin-off companies. Many of them are run by successful professors. In contrast to the universities, all companies' purpose is to make money and not work simply to promote knowledge and science. In that regard, your professor has done nothing wrong or (most importantly) illegal. He is using his unquestionable know-how to make a successful company and more money for himself. But along with him, several good students get the opportunity to be hired on a promising job, once they finish their studies. And this is not only good for the professor, but it is also good for the university, the students and the country's economy in general. In that sense, you should stop seeing the whole thing as a corporate conspiracy.
The fact that science sometimes provides exceptionally good consumer products (from TVs to mobile phones and electric lamps) should not be considered evil in itself. Yes, many times companies use technological advances for evil purposes but providing support and extending open-source CS projects, is surely not one of those cases. The only questionable thing your professor might have done, is if he has used his students as free workforce (without any compensation), during the master's thesis when they were working on extending his product. But even then, this is sometimes how internships work on many companies.
So, I would not worry too much. Having a spin-off is not really an ethical issue, nor does it make your professor a horrible person. Of course you have the right to disagree with this practice and avoid participating in his business endeavors. So, finish your studies, minimizing contact with this professor and do things differently the way you see ethical and fit when you enter the job market.

+1 for the last two sentences of the penultimate paragraph. it is what I think so too. Note some people even pay to do an internship. This already sounds like a better project (in the view of getting a job) than a lot of master projects I know (although I am from a different discipline). I know financial maths students who did Master projects for big investment bank. I'd rather have this guy making money than Goldman Sachs...

@Lost1 how can you pretend some moral accusations against banks, and same time support this answer saying "do not worry about ethics, it is none of your business"

@emcor penultimate paragraph, not last paragraph.

@emcor. Do not worry about "how ethical someone is" is not the same as "do not worry about ethics". The world is full of unethical people. You cannot and will not change them. You can only be ethical yourself and influence those around you. This is why I wrote "do things differently if you do not agree with his practices"

@Alexandros I see you meant this in a different way, but still if nobody would care about general ethics that seems not a solution to me but rather increasing the problem.

It's not only a matter of caring about general ethics, for several reasons. Students qua students are clearly stakeholders in the functioning of the university. Students qua citizens have every right to be concerned about the use of public funds. All this is their business.

@Relaxed I see your point. Let's say the professor shuts down his company. How does this benefit the students or the university?

@Alexandros I don't think I expressed any view on that and I am genuinely unsure about it. I merely object to your last paragraph.

@PeteL.Clark I respect your opinions greatly. But in my opinion (and a large part of the Academia SE - hence the upvotes) having a spin-off is not really an ethical issue. We are not talking about a professor stealing authorship or making-out with his students. Then the ethics of the professor do matter, when in the case of his legal business endeavors really do not. If the OP does not want to  do a thesis with this professor, he is free to select any other professor.

I could not disagree more with the last paragraph. One of the most important life skills is constant surrounding yourself with ethical people. I would hate to tell someone at such an impressionable stage in their life that they won't suffer consequences for being in the company of the unethical.

People are beginning to respond to comments misrepresenting the answer, rather than the original answer. @Alexandros does not say "don't worry about ethics"; rather, "I would not worry... [This] is not an ethical issue". It is fair to answer a question "is xyz ethical?" with neither a "yes"/"no", but rather "this is not a question of ethics" -- i.e., not a matter of right/wrong, but just a matter of convention/norms in a particular context. (And imho, this practice is by no means unusual these days.)

@michael_n: The last paragraph in the answer used to be: "So, I would not worry too much about how ethical your professor is. It is none of your business after all. Finish your studies and do things differently, if you do not agree with his practices."  It is fair to characterize this as telling the OP not to worry: in fact, the language seems stronger than that.  Since then the answer has been edited, perhaps making some of the comments obsolete.  But I don't see any misrepresentation.

@PeteL.Clark Thanks -- I didn't notice the answer was edited. (The clarification was requested, and made. No harm, no foul.)

(-1) Although there is no ethical problem with a professor having a spin-off, there are huge ethical problems about a professor potentially abusing the fact that a student is in an exam (master thesis is [part of] the final exam in Germany).

@Jigg Thank you for reading my answer line-to-line but really you make too much fuss over it. You can freely downvote it since you do not like it.

Yes, it's ethical to have students work on your research interests
The core idea of research mentorship is that it's useful for people to collaborate, and for professors to 'split off' interesting, manageable chunks of research directions for others to handle - either as part of study projects or research grants. Pretty much always it will be related to topics that interest the professor personally, and it's okay.
I believe that most researchers have a list of subproblems that they aren't going to do themselves, but for which they'd like a solution and a student research project could [attempt to] to solve it. I have such a list myself, students are happy that it exists, but most of them do have some use case where the thesis outcome (data/tool/method/etc) would be directly useful to me personally in my research.
If the student wants to work on X, and the professor says "you must do topic Y", then that would be unethical unless there's funding/employment agreement for the student to do Y. However, if student "needs" a thesis topic and is okay with doing Y, then it's ethical to recommend topics that aren't "neutral"(which would that be?) but are of personal interest to you.
Yes, it's ethical for your research interests to benefit you commercially
Turning academic research into commercial spinoffs isn't an unwanted exploitation - in fact, it generally is the explicit wish of the universities, funding agencies and government research policies to facilitate commercialization and implementation of research.
If a professor has ideas on how particular research topics can be applied commercially, then it's a good thing - it estabilishes that the topic is meaningful and provides a real world context to otherwise abstract notions.
Having the research benefit your business as such is okay, given the university approval for that spinoff, but there may be ethical concerns with how it's done.
Is he coercing students to work in that direction?
Are there signs of coercion - i.e., do students feel threatened that if they choose an unrelated topic then they'd be treated differently, get different grading, etc?
Is he recommending students to work on bad / non-research topics?
Are the recommended projects ("algorithmic modules for the open-source software") a good fit for the master thesis requirements of your university?
If software engineering and algorithmic implementation are valid and recommended goals for thesis in your particular master's program (it often is), then it's ethical.
If that study program expects students to focus on academic research during the thesis, but in those projects students spend 90% time on software engineering and thus either produce poor thesis or have to spend huge work that's not beneficial to the thesis, then that would be giving misleading and hurtful advice and it's not ethical.
Is he stealing intellectual property?
If copyrighted or patentable items are created by the students (such as software) as part of their academic work, are they either (a) freely available to the public; (b) clearly owned by the student; or (c) purchased as a separate agreement or through an employment contract for the time of developing it?
Publishing work results on an open source project would be ethical; a company using public and published results of student's work is also clearly okay.
Publishing work results on a dual-licenced project where the student's code is available, say, as GPL to the public and also the same student's code as a closed source licence for a fee from the company raises the question on how does the student licenced the code to that company.   A scenario where work is done on "university time", and the company simply takes the not-public work without compensating the author would be unethical.
Is he hiding his vested interest in that particular project?
Is he disclosing that he has a commercial interest in this open source project to the students? If he's not telling them it when offering the topics, then it would be unethical.

+1 - Excellent analysis of the different facets of the question!

"If the student wants to work on X, and the professor says "you must do topic Y", then that would be unethical unless there's funding/employment agreement for the student to do Y. However, if student "needs" a thesis topic and is okay with doing Y, then it's ethical to recommend topics that aren't "neutral"(which would that be?) but are of personal interest to you.". What about the situation where the students "needs" a topic and agrees to do Y but only because the professor "forgot" to mention X that would benefits more the student but less the professor?

@Taladris if you ask me to pick a topic for you, then we're automatically discarding 99% of possible X'es - I can recommend topics that I have identified during my research interests, which are a small part of my subfield; and my subfield is a small part of CS as such. About topic "benefitting the student" - who would know better about those topics than the student themselves? But if they have no specific interests and don't have a preference for any research direction, then apparently there are no research directions that would be "made especially for them" and they just need a valid topic.

If the thesis is on an academic topic, and the student later agrees to work at a company, there is nothing wrong with that.
But the professor must not exert pressure on the student for example that the thesis grade would depend on accepting a work contract, and if some of the work is not directly related to the thesis it should be compensated like normal work. It appears that here the student works out a thesis based on an industry-topic, and later decides where to work. The fact that the professor who assigns the topic also owns a company has no direct ethical consequences as such, because the student is free to choose from any possible company or supervisor out there.

... with big emphasis on the very first "if" and "must not exert pressure". Although I'm not sure the student is that free to choose their supervisor (how many alternative supervisors are available, given that the student probably wants to specialize in that field?)

IANAL, and I guess that the question cannot be completely answered as some details are missing, but:

Doing a thesis in a company or on a subject that is suggested by a company is perfectly fine. This is called "Externe Abschlussarbeit" (external thesis). There can also be contracts between the student and the company. But in oder to be legally valid, the contracts must not abuse the fact that the student has to do the exam and is therefore not an equal party to the contract but dependent.
Many universities actually have rules (and/or even a contact person) for related questions. Here are some examples

TU Berlin/ dt. Hochschulverband
TU Darmstadt

However, the usual setup is that the supervisor from the company and the professor are two different persons, and it is the professor's task to ensure that the thesis consists of the proper amount of research.
With this I do see a conflict of interest in the OP's scenario.
In Germany, a master's thesis is a "Prüfungsleistung" (part of the final exam). The Prüfungsleistung must be produced solely by the candidate.
This implies that the master's thesis (not only the written thesis, but all ideas, software etc) is IP of the student.
Highly relevant lecture: Helmut Messer: Rechtsgrundsätze zu Diplomarbeiten
rough translation of a scenario on page 7:

Professor tells student that he has 2 kinds of thesis subjects: nothing-special subjects and highly interesting very innovative external thesis subjects which will practically lead to immedate job offers. For the external theses, however, the transferrable IP rights need to be tranfered in advance (either to the prof. or to the company).

The text then goes on explaining that this constitutes at least Vorteilsannahme (acceptance of benefits by a public official) by the professor, and that depending on the pressure and the exact situation also blackmailing is close by. Basically, the professor must not ask any more than the exam regulations say.
So the ethic problems in question are not only of the "does not behave well"-kind but can actually constitute criminal offenses. And IIRC, public officials already have to avoid the appearance of Vorteilsannahme (and of course blackmailing).

However, after the thesis is finished (and the mark is given) the company (or university) can negotiate to buy the transferrable rights, because then both parties of the contract are in an equal position, and the student can say no, or ask for compensation. Obviously, the student can decide on his own to release the product Open Source.
Somehow I doubt that "we will hire you if you give us your previously written code" is a legal contract, but again IANAL.
The lecture explains that the professor has a certain responsibility also concerning abusive contracts between student and company (in general, not only in the OP's scenario) because the student depends on the professor.

I commented to @Steffen Winkler that software copyright is somewhat special and different from other copyrighted works. According to Urhg §69b the (transferrable economic) rights are automatically assigned to the employer. Court cases apply this automatism to a rather wide range of software (i.e. as soon as it is related / useful for the employer, e.g. regardless of whether the development took place in free time at home), and state that the wages are already the proper compensation.
However, AFAIK it is non-trivial to formulate a legal contract that has the student employed for the subject of the thesis. The linked lecture gives scenarios that work and scenarios that do not work.

I'm with Marc. There's no issue at all here... In fact, under this arrangement, he needs not worry about securing public grant funding which means he's more free to do any kind of research work he wants... which can certainly filter back to you.
You might even be able to strike up an arrangement where you'll do work for him and you can use his lab for whatever research topic you want... There are multiple ways to look at this, and to me, all of them are positive. The community gets source, the public doesn't have to fund his research (though he probably still has students write grants for new ideas), for-profit businesses pay for top-tier service.
Let's not also forget, that in the non-academic world, practical experience is valued more than your education (especially in the USA). Your time working in the professor's company while at the same time getting BOTH thesis research AND "real-world" experience puts you in a much better position come graduation than peers who go the traditional route.
I'd be more inclined to hire someone who has dealt with source-code management + a good thesis ahead of someone who only had a superb thesis topic. (The more things you can be measured with, the better for you.)

@Jigg...because the company is not profitable. You do not know that. Internships are always very cheap labor, even for Google, Yahoo, MS. The fact that the money offered are not great, it is not due to those companies not being profitable.

@Jigg As currently stated, the question doesn't supply enough information to make a judgment on profitability, bets or no bets.  Also if the company isn't profitable, moot point.  There ceases to be an ethical dilemma if the prof isn't profiting lasciviously, or in a way that is grossly unfair compared to other student workers.

@Jigg I'm not getting paid to do my thesis, and the results will ultimately get used by someone else, maybe for profit, maybe not at all.  Doesn't bother me.

@Jigg No company, in it's right mind, will pay when it doesn't have to, even if it is capable of doing so. Using student work doesn't imply anything about the profitability of the company.

Spin-offs normally are not allowed to stay inside the university forever, they move away and become independent companies. Staying permanently in a state-owned building, with free access to the laboratory equipment, Internet, library, etc, probably would not be very fair. However the "spinning-off" process usually lasts for several years.
Creating a successful commercial product on the base of research is an important process that is usually allowed, supported and encouraged. Spin-offs receive support from the parent institution in the early stages when they are not yet capable of self-sustaining.

Bottom line:
Studying a university is more about how you use opportunities available to you than about how much do you learn from the baseline 'forced upon' everyone. I presume there is a free choice available to you and other students whether to take the master thesis assignment from the professor in question or from other. That means, that 'working for free for a commercial company' (this is how I understand your concern) is not the only possibility to finish your studies. Every student, you included, have the choice to do what they find right and beneficial. That means, that you can do whatever you can with the opportunity - get some hands on experience, or, for example, train your inner sense for what you find right and what wrong. Which is equally as important!
The professor is giving you opportunity, not forcing something on you.
Personally, I would rather work on a demanding task from a high flying professor with a prospect of a nice job in the open-source world than do some mundane task that has been repeated over and over just because the latter may seem more fit for academia.
If you plan to get a job in a commercial company (rather than staying in academic field for your PhD and further career), having done your thesis in the described setting may very well give you a noticeable advantage over competing job-seekers.
(The first paragraph edited to reflect on Jigg's comment)

Everybody would rather work on a 'demanding task from a high flying professor' rather than a 'mundane task'. How is this relevant to the ethical question raised by OP?

@Jigg valid point, thank you. I wrote the answer rather as a reaction to other answers without re-reading the question first. I'll edit my answer.

I see two issues:
One, it sounds like the students just get a programming assignment -- "here, make this". That alone wouldn't make it Master level research fit for a thesis.
Second, the student is the author of the software he writes and holds copyright over it, so he should decide under which license he wants to release it, if he wants to release it at all. Forcing him to release it under a specific license that happens to work well for the company is a clear conflict of interest.

If he works for the company of the professor during his internship, it is much more common that the copyright of the project goes to the company. At least, that is what any sensible company does. There are even companies that claim ownership of code that an employee writes in their own time (which I think goes too far).

Yes, but he didn't mention an internship.

I am going to back a bit Jigg's point of view.
I believe it is not ethical to pressure students into master thesis which is a module of some software for which the student will not be able to set license and more of that which is used for profits of the professor.
I also should say that it fine if student signs some kind of contract if he chooses to go this way and if not he still has a choice to do masters thesis with this professor that is not anyhow connected to the professor's company or that software.
I was myself in the similar situation (German style education system, but not in Germany) however it wasn't a masters thesis but just a semester final thesis for one of the subjects.
In my case professor was taking the best of the software students developed as a thesis in whole or as a part to the product of his profit making company (no attribution to student at all). I don't claim that the OP's professor does the same but I believe OP can still have the issues I had:

I couldn't determine the actual theme of thesis.
The subject final mark was decided not by the standards of university thesis but rather by the commercial standards which are obviously higher.
I was under pressure to agree with everything professor wishes for the product even if it was out of the thesis scope.
I was under extreme pressure to deliver commercial quality product in restricted time having other subjects to study.

Because of this situation I ended up almost failing this and another subject and with a very bad relationship with that professor since I wasn't able to deliver what he wanted(although it was perfectly fine for the scope of the semester thesis). I could get a very bad reputation but fortunately for me quite a lot of other professors/stuff knew how he does things so the damage was not that big.
What I am trying to say is that by dealing with such people OP puts himself in the situation when he is totally dependent of them and people tend to be quite cruel.

+1 Coding a commercial product (robust, documented, benchmarked, etc.) is different than doing research (creative, novel, conceptual). One thing I noticed about the students in your situation is how vigorously they would defend their abusing supervisor (some of the reactions on this thread seem to be along that line) when it's suggested to them that they are not fairly treated. It doesn't seem to be your case.

Stockholm syndrome. This guy(professor) made my life much harder in remaining years since at the time of event I wasn't silent among students about it(I didn't try to report him to university being afraid of consequences). He probably was afraid that more students will know how he does business and try to avoid him.

An alternative is that these people do not share your opinion, and see this as a great opportunity.

@PaulHiemstra 2 persons out of ~20 were satisfied, the others hated the guy as they said about a year after when he no longer could do harm to them. Although this is only my case and I don't say that in other cases such work can't be beneficial for students.

We can split this problem to two:
From Professors perspective it would be unethical to assign students a project that does not support the objectives (ie. research or education) of the academic organization by which he is currently employed. If this condition is met, the project can as well be open sourced. He can not, in general, force the student to open the source, but this may vary from one country to another and depends on who holds the copyright of the original work, student or the organization.
From student perspective, only question is (if you really hold the copyright) whether you allow the source to be opened. Either you allow, or you do not.
If these conditions are met, and the work is released as open source under a proper license, anyone may try to make legally money with it as long as the license terms are not violated. Including the professor. It is inherent nature of open source: someone may benefit from it also financially, and you can try to do that too.

My first impulse is crying out loud, but I see that it must be explained.
What is the goal of academic instituitions / science / humanities ?
The goal is to collect and reserve the current knowledge, give it to the
next generations and gain further knowledge. We want to find good
explanations for phenomena and refine them further und further until
ideally we can explain them fully (The explanation need not to be
identical with the "real" cause, it should only give the correct
predictions).
What we do not want is to consolidate our prejudices or fall victim
to wishful thinking. The key is honesty: Do not fool yourself to believe
you know something which you are not absolutely sure of. You are able
to give convincing reasons to other people.
You are completely convinced that astrology is truthful because an astrologer
described you correctly and you pay a study which confirms your impression ?
This is not science.
You are completely convinced that astrology is baloney because it seems to
be old and it violates what you think is correct knowledge ? This is not science either !
You write down the logical inconsistencies of astrology, put up a study to test the conclusions and the tests repeatedly and consistently failed ? This is science.
What is the goal of businesses ?
A key concept of a business is to gain revenue by fulfilling a demand. Because in private
enterprise you have competitors you must also apply strategy to
keep your business and use that to increase your influence. That means

Having unique or better knowledge. If your competitors do not know how you achieved your desired results, it would be stupid to tell them. Or you protect your invention with patents.
Propagate your influence by using your revenue to spread out. Gain power from important persons (friendships, franchises and working together).
Protect yourself and hold your competitors down. You can do that defensively (lawsuits, patents) or offensively (buying them off, spread bad rumors, outpace them in quality and quantity).

Both goals are perfectly ok.
If you leave university and begin a startup, no problem. If a firm buys your invention, no problem. It starts to be trouble if you have a conflict of interest and the professor has a severe conflict of interest.
If you did not see it, honesty is not a business goal.
Let's say the professor gives you a task to improve a specific software module. You are starting to analyze the module...and you find that it has a flaw. It does not work or even causes harm, you can scientifically prove it. You have found out that the prospering company your professor leads has sold a defective software. Revelation of this could harm the reputation of the university, the software company and even your economy of your country. Or, on the other hand, it does nothing, but the professor wants to improve the user experience so that the customers are happy even if sold junk.
Do you feel still perfectly ok with that scenario ?
Because for this reason research and business should have distinct areas because you cannot honestly find a scientific answer if you are under constant pressure to modify your findings in a specific direction (or to be punished if you insist on honesty). The law of reciprocity always kicks in, I have supported you, why don't you support me.
I mean, we see the problem everywhere. "Think tanks" are buying old academics to support "research" in environmental issues. Politicians and companies are buying supportive studies. Consumer products are called back and almost always the problem was known long before. Academic fraud for research grants is a known problem. etc.
The problem is not that the professor is a horrible person or that business is evil or science must be pure and idealistic. The problem is that many universities are dependent on private funding and try to give students the impression that it is absolutely no problem to mix business and scientific research. Guess what: It is a lie.

If this were true, no collaboration between academia and industry would ever be possible. For a start, there are tons of PhD studies funded by private companies for people to develop and improve their products. They know they work, but they know there are people that know how to make them better, and so they pay for it. I personally know many cases where there is no conflict of interest at all, and the academics have freedom to critizise the current state of affairs, if necessary.

@Davidmh Yes, collaborations between academia and industry have existed. No, it does not invalidate what I said. First, once you have grown to be a full academic, you are free to choose what you do. Second, in collaborations there are two superiors, your professor and your manager. If things go awry on the business side, you can go to your professor and he should be obliged to support you. In this specific case, this is broken: The student's academic career is dependent on the professor and there is no second instance.

Addition: The whole concept of tenure is to provide academics with a background which allows them to tell their opinion without pressure from advocate groups. Millions of americans have driven before the seat-belt and airbag and never had an accident. Does it mean that it is a sound and safe practice to do that because it works on most cases ? What if the situation I said really occurs ? Small scale: You have found out that your PhD study does not show any improvement. One option is to be frank and get no/negative acknowledgement. And then there are other options.

I think that it depends on several factors. If the supervisor is offering you some grants from the company to do your research work than he may expect something back that he may commercializes. But in any case, it would be better to have a discussion about that before the project starts. It is always important to makes things clear before starting a project. If things are not made clear than it may cause some conflicts afterwards. If things are made clear and a student is not satisfied, he may also just work with another professor.
Besides, I think that the job of a master degree student should be to do research, not to do  unrelated software development tasks (unless he is getting paid or if he wants to). But participating in a company project can also have several benefits. Besides, from what I understand, you are also publishing your research as open-source. I believe that publishing research as open-source is very beneficial. Personally, I do research in the field of data mining  and publish all my research as open-source (data mining algorithms and datasets) as part of a data mining library/software, and I don't earn any money from that. But this has increased the visibility of my research. Thus, perhaps that you should see it from this perspective. If your new algorithms is included in a commercial software or large open-source project, it will probably gives a lot of visibility to your algorithms, and your research will be probably used and cited by more researchers.

I would say that the best advice is to make sure that there is a clear partition between the open source parts of the software vs. the business parts and that the students are informed of this.
Many professors get students to work on research that is (or becomes) commercial in nature (e.g. biology).  The key ethical issue is that the students are informed and are educated to make proper decisions about it.


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Add a Collaborative Report in my CV
I'm applying to a PhD program in Biostatistics. Two years ago I was member of a team crew hired by the United Nations to write a report on security. This report was published last year and has my name on it in the Statistics section. A summary of the report is publicly available.
I am considering including this report as a publication but I am concerned that an admissions officer may think that I am inflating my CV.
Should I include this report as a publication on my CV?

These kinds of grey literature are often included in CV's but it's important to be clear about the nature of the publication.  I would put this after any peer reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings papers in a section titled something like "technical reports and other manuscripts."   If you don't have any other publications, then it may make sense to simply describe the project (and what you did on the project in particular) and mention in passing that you were a coauthor on the project report.
For someone just applying to a PhD program, this will look good on your application and certainly shouldn't hurt.

So being part of the statistics team does make me a coauthor?

Looking over the report there's a very long list of people involved in the project including a subset of "authors" and a separate listing of the statistics team.  I think it's fair to put in your resume/CV that you were a part of the statistics team on this project but not an author.

Ok, so since I'm not in the authors section it wouldn't be fair to write it in the Publications section? And just mention it in my previous job experience.

Yes.  This is still a substantial accomplishment for an undergraduate student- don't sell it short.

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Is organizing a thesis competition a good way to connect academia and business?
I would like to ask if you think that organizing an international thesis competition is a good way to bridge the gap between students (mostly graduates) and companies. The idea is to have jury members of industry partners and alumni, which will have access to and judge the theses and thus:

Students and graduates will be able to make hopefully valuable connections
Businesses will profit from having an insight of what young people write about.

Is organizing a thesis competition likely to be a fruitful endeavor?

It takes a lot of work to read a thesis and most businesses will not profit from reading a thesis, even one that is about a similar area.

The idea of connecting people is good, as @StrongBad points out, its a good deal of work to read a thesis.  It may be more worthwhile to hold a competition in which people submit 1 to 5 page papers about their thesis (similar to an article).  This would also make contributions from students more likely if they have written a publication on their work

Also note that even when the knowledge can be transferred, the interests of Academia and Industry are not fully aligned. It is usually the broader knowledge of the field that has market value.

It would be very hard to judge these things due to a dearth of objective criteria. Also, getting a panel of widely knowledgeable, senior employees (whose time is short and expensive) to each read and judge at least several theses just isn't feasible - and that's assuming that the field is narrow enough that the judges have the expertise to understand every thesis.
Unless you have a vested and very specific interest in the thesis, there just isn't any point in reading it. A short presentation or abstract is really all that's necessary to get the gist of the research.
A much better solution would be a thesis presentation competition. My old university did a university-wide "thesis in three" competition every year. Entrants had three minutes to give a presentation on their research, in front of a general audience and a panel of judges from all disciplines (a more specialized competition could allocate more time).
This could have many advantages, including:

the panel will be able to view all of the presentations in less time than it takes to read just one thesis
it assesses a very valuable real-world skill: the ability to distil a complicated piece of work into a simple and exciting nutshell
you can see someone's enthusiasm for a topic
gathering for drinks and dinner after the presentations will be a fantastic networking opportunity. Job offers could be flying about all over the place.

In the age of the internet, it would be easy to ask participants to create a video presentation if they cannot attend the event (possibly even in the style of a YouTube educational video, with narrated drawings / animations). This way, no one needs to travel across the country or world.

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Why is the variance in quality between German universities regarded as less than that of America?
From browsing through many threads on Reddit and discussing with people offsite, I find that the general impression is that most German universities are equally good; for example this one.
How did they become equally good? As far as I understand, there is a high degree of self governance for the German state governments to choose the policy in regards to their universities, so I'd imagine a higher variance in quality by state.

I address some relevant aspects in my answer to Why do German universities rank so low internationally? I might distill them into an answer to this question later. In brief: In the German system, speaking of the quality of a university doesn’t make much sense.

That's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer myself. However, what is most likely at least part of the answer is that universities do not charge tuition (at least to local students), so there has never been all that much incentive for unis to market themselves as better than the other universities next door.

Germany has roughly 400 universities. The US has roughly 4000, many of which are private.

@JonCuster: In the German system it's important to distinguish between universities (= "Universitäten") and "universities of applied sciences (= "Fachhochschulen") (I'm still angry at whoever came up with this extremely misleading translation, which makes it much more difficult to explain this in an international setting.) Regarding the universities, there are roughly about 100 in Germany - plus a number of very small and specialized institutions which can be very relevant for specific subjects, but are negligible for most subjects (due to their specialization or small number of students).

@JochenGlueck - well, many of the 4000 universities/colleges in the US are small as well. However, Germany has ~1/4 the population of the US, and has much less than 1/4 the number of institutions of higher learning...

@JonCuster: Indeed, these are two very good points. (By the way, the German Wikipedia has a nice list of institutions of tertiary eduction in Germany, which indeed lists 422 institutions, as you said. A look at the list - in particular at the different types of institutions and at the distribution of student numbers - indicates that a more detailed quantitative comparison between the  US and Germany will probably quickly enter the stage of a statistical nightmare... ;-) )

The causes for this are much broader than the educational system per se. Germany is a country where equality of chances is more naturally ingrained in the institutions, as opposed to the US, where vast disparities and monopolies of "excellence" are exacerbated in almost every aspect of society (education, healthcare, income, etc).

There a few factors here:

There are different reputation-quality-feedback loops in play. To oversimplify slightly: In the US, people believe that universities have signficant quality differences. Thus, good students and academics go to highly ranked universities. This leads to highly-ranked universities to actually be signficantly better, which feeds the belief that this is the case. In Germany, people don't perceive significant differences, so they don't care about ratings. Subsequently, good students and academics are more evenly distributed amongst universities, and quality differences are small.

German universities have limited means to attract/select the best people. Salaries are determined by the state, as are the required teaching hours. Admission requirements can't be overly strict by law either. This again leads to a more even distribution of who goes where in terms of talent.

Germany has a culture of proper job qualifications other than university degrees, and thus far fewer people go to university. It seems about 1/3 of German school leavers go to university, while it's 2/3 in the US. As such, German universities are all comparable only with the more selective US institutions as far as incoming student quality is concerned.

Plus, degrees from private institutions are sometimes seen as "easily bought" titles and of lesser quality than titles from public institutions. This ties somewhat into your point (1).

This leads to highly-ranked universities to actually be signficantly better — depends how you measure.  They "produce" more high-ranking politicians and captains of industry, but much of that is because they select future leaders using their admissions process.  As for point (3): one should be careful about definition differences; both a German Universität and Fachhochschule would be called university in the US.

These points are all good and important but I think this misses the single most important one, namely money. German universities are funded almost exclusively from the government and the government assigns funding in a way that results in fairly similar amounts per student across all universities. US universities are funded from multiple different sources but even the government funded ones have vastly differing amounts of money per student.

To be honest, there are some quality differences when it comes to taught subjects. E.g. Bonn and Kiel are held in a higher regard when it comes to studying Geography, than other German universities. The same is true for other subjects, both tied to history, professors and teaching staff. The latter change, obviously. Still, differences exist, while not as profound as in between US universities.

I'd like to point out with regard to (2) that for as long as we're talking about full professorships, there is quite some room for negotiations as far as teaching obligations, associated staff and scientific equipment is concerned – but also with regard to the salary. This is actively used by many professors who apply for open positions at other universities to force their current university into a bidding contest with the potentially new one.

@gerrit 's point is important. The term college in the U.S. includes Fachhochschule-like institutions which simply don't do science at the same level as universities, don't teach on the same theoretical level and typically do not provide the opportunity to obtain a PhD (and consequently don't have postgraduates doing research). Many college courses in the U.S. in fact provide an education which is comparable to an industrial or technical  vocational training in Germany (e.g. Mechatroniker, medizinisch-technischer Assistent); those courses are not scientific at all.

@Erik: yes, but that's at faculty or even group level - one wouldn't claim that in general Bonn is better or worse than, say, Darmstadt. One may prefer Bonn for classical maths and Darmstadt for computer science leaning towards AI or EE. OTOH, I'd expect any German university that offers a particular subject to deliver an education that allows a successful student to go for a PhD at a university that is more famous for their research in the particular field the student wants to specialize in.

Asking for whether a German university is better than another makes roughly as much sense whether craftspeople in one city are better than in another: Sure, some businesses are better than others, one city will have the very best craftsperson, and maybe one of the cities has a vibrant plumbing community leading to a significantly better quality of plumbing in that city. However, at the end of the day, this will have little effect on the average quality of a services or help you select a particular service: If you need your violin repaired, it doesn’t help you that the world’s best hair stylist lives next door.
Similarly, the idea that a university is generally better than another is – prima facie – absurd:
If a university has one of the world’s leading historians or is best at teaching biology to its students, this tells you very little of the quality of teaching or research at its math department.
You may have a strong correlation of quality within an institute, a modest one within a department, but this becomes negligible once you go to the faculty or university level.
The main thing that connects different faculties within a university are its central services (administration, cantina, etc.), but these barely affect teaching and research quality.
Thus I think the question rather is: Why do other countries have such high difference in university quality? I think the main reasons are:

Reputation feedback loop: A good reputation attracts better students and personnel, which in turn leads to better teaching and research, which leads to a better reputation. More on this in this answer of mine.

Financial feedback loop: More money allows you to hire better researchers and teachers, have a higher teacher-to-student ratio, and perform more expensive research, which in turn allows you to acquire more money from student fees, sponsors, and grants.

Historical bias: For example, in the US most (if not all) top universities are rather old or were funded with insane amounts of money (see the previous point). Young universities usually have bad chances of acquiring a reputation etc.

As German universities are state-funded, the financial loop is mostly absent. Also, this limits the reputation loop: Why should the state fund more room or personnel at one university when there is unused space and personnel elsewhere? As for the historical aspect, Germany had many universities before it became feasible for most students and personnel to select a university solely based on quality aspects as opposed to geographical ones. Those were of comparable quality for the same reason outlined in the initial example with craftspeople.

As far as I understand, there is a high degree of self governance for the German state governments to choose the policy in regards to their universities, so I'd imagine a higher variance in quality by state.

Kind of. On the one hand things such as finances are largely homogenised, so they don’t factor into this. On the other hand, for other aspects so much freedom is left to the individual faculties, and departments that the effects smear out at the university level. For example most physics departments in Germany adhere to rather similar standards of teaching, but this is completely different from how any law department operates.

I don't know a lot about the US system but I guess a lot of the top unis there are heavily funded by private citizens and companies. I guess the salaries of professors is also not uniform. I am also guessing that "good" unis get grants more easily, can afford more high-end state of the art labs and equipment that help them to produce more cutting edge research, which in turn makes them even more attractive and their "betterness" is structurally perpetuated.
In Germany, on the other hand, (public) university education is paid for by the state and the amount of money that the universities get is roughly the same for similar amounts of students. The salaries of professors are regulated by the German government as well - every professor at the same level gets more or less the same money. So there is not much reason to have a "brain drain" of the best professors to specific universities - the benefits are not as big. Of course, some unis are more attractive / have a bit more prestige (like e.g. Heidelberg or Tübingen due to being very old institutions, or unis in bigger cities like Hamburg or Berlin due to the added value of being able to live in a great city).
Also, if not many students enroll in your programs because the quality of learning is bad, you might get less funds as a university, which is an incentive to keep the quality of education as high as possible.

There is also the aspect that accredidation agencies want to see the same standards wherever they go. And courses of study need accreditation. Apart from that, I just wished the last paragraph of your message were universally true. It's not unheard of that the ministry of education of a state presses some of its universities to accept more students, which risks a decrease in learning quality due to admitting unqualified candidates, who still have to be taken care of.

Many US institutions are also public, and there's quite a bit of variance in perceived quality even just among public institutions, so I don't think that aspect is as important. Rather, it's that even at public institutions, students/families are mostly responsible for paying tuition rather than the government, so there is both a need for more "budget" options and a competition for students that make institutions want to tout how good they are.

I don't think tuition is the factor.  Look at France, where university is free, but the ENS (and many of the other grandes ecoles) have a much higher reputation than ordinary universities.

I think it makes sense to think of this question differently: why do US universities have such differences in reputation?

Comparing apples to apples, German universities do have big differences in reputation.  The institutions in the US that primarily play the role of Universitäten and those that primarily play the role of Fachhochschulen are both called universities.  Universitäten and Fachhochschulen definitely do NOT have the same reputation in Germany.

The US systems are designed with differences in reputation built in.  By law, the various campuses of the University of California accept the top 12% of California high school students.  The remaining California students are simply not allowed to go to one of the University of California campuses; they go to one of the California State University campuses.  (Note all these campuses pretty much operate as independent universities, and, in practice, UCB and UCLA have students in the top 4% and the other 9 UC campuses have students in the 5-12% range.)

(Think about this question in the French context too - it's obvious why ENS has a much higher reputation than the ordinary French universities.)

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Should I report a labmate who is into drugs?
I am a second-year PhD student in the US. I work in my lab during the night-time. I find that one of the senior PhD students in my lab is into drugs big league. I would not mind that if it were not to affect me, but it does in two ways - sometimes the smell in the lab during the late hours is horrible, and he moans incongruously and loudly at times without taking others' presence into consideration.
Talking to the supervisor may not be of use, because he takes it coolly and I have heard the two joke about drug use in casual conversations. The fellow PhDs also take fun in his eerie ways, and him being an excellent and helpful chap, they do not want to fuss about his habits.
If at all, should I raise this issue with my advisor, the department or the police? Sometimes I feel I should be silent about it all, bite my teeth and bear it for a year as he will graduate then. But at other times, I am so heckled about being disturbed during my hours of concentration. Is there a discreet way for me to handle this tricky situation?

You are seeking legal advice here which no-one here is qualified to give. Talk to a lawyer. What's clear is that, even if the law turns out to require you to report your colleague (which is quite likely), you will in most likelihood have to look for a different lab to work in, so take steps to prepare your move.

I am not seeking legal advice. I am simply asking if there are discreet ways to handle this situation.

I don't see the word "discreet" anywhere in your question. Moreover, it currently reads more like a rant, than a question. And given the contradictions in your post, the fact you've registered today, and the baiting nature of your question, I'd guess you are a troll. So, I'm voting to close, unless the question is heavily modified.

I am afraid you are entering legal territory here, depending on country. That's exactly why I made that comment. I am afraid that this is already beyond "discretion", unless your country has a tolerant view of the issue.

You are annoyed because he disturbs you, not because he uses (apparently illicit) drugs. The former is not against the law, and whether the second should be is controversial. Certainly, if he were loud because of frequently being in the lab drunk, you would be equally annoyed, despite alcohol being a legal drug in most of the world.

@101010111100: I cannot obviously reveal myself when asking a question like this. I am here to be helped and not probed.

@dan1111: 1. No safety angle. 2. Yes, the supervisor is sympathetic to his habit.

I'm confused: how does this person's drug use lead to a bad smell in the lab?  Are they smoking drugs in the lab?  Cooking drugs?  Do they have poor hygiene which you think is related to their drug use?

@dan1111 I am afraid, that's exactly where it gets murky. I suspect that there are jurisdictions where staying quiet on suspected illegal acts may make you complicit. I am not saying that I agree with that. But it may very well be a legal question, depending on country. As for sorting out the issue: I used to be in a lab where there was an extremely heavy smoker (there was no smoking ban then). There was no way of making him stop. In the end, we utilised a technicality (based on equipment damage) to do so. The lungs of the coworkers did not play a role in the argument then.

@CaptainEmacs: The country is the United States.  See first line of the question.

@NateEldredge Isn't there a difference between US states? I do not know the legality status in different states, and that's why I keep qualifying my statements.

@NateEldredge: I am told there is a hideout close by where he goes to smoke. His hygiene is poor, but whether it is related to drugs is not something for me to say.

Did you raise the issue with him?

@gerrit: I am afraid to do so - firstly it is difficult to find him sober, secondly I do not want to be branded a fusspot behind my back, and thirdly, I do not want to be punched!

One more point of interest: reporting to police because that's required by law is one thing. Reporting to police to stop him disrupting your work is another. Frankly, sorting out work atmosphere should be the business of the group leader, not yours, and neither the police's.

@Remo If you are afraid to do so because you don't want to be punched, then it certainly is a safety issue, isn't it? Being afraid of your co-workers is not particularly good for the amosphere, with or without drugs.

@gerrit: Yes, but my fear could be irrational or unwarranted too.

@Remo any chance of working the days rather than nights? And would that be better?

What kind of drugs are we actually talking about?

The legality of the type of drug is irrelevant.  If he were annoying or otherwise harming the productivity of labmates while drunk, it would be equally problematic, despite alcohol being a legal drug in most of the world.  So in my opinion, the legal situation is not really relevant for you personally.
Talk to your supervisor and/or others within the department, such as a health&safety officer. Focus on the problem his behaviour is causing for you; his behaviour is reducing the quality of your working environment and harming your productivity. It is their responsibility to provide a safe and quiet working environment where you can be productive.  That may include enforcing that co-workers do not harm such conditions.  Here I mean safe in a broad sense, not necessarily implying that his drug use is dangerous for you.

After that, the question is whether you would choose to report someone for using illicit drugs (even if the law requires you to do so); that is a moral question that is up to you to answer for yourself.  We cannot help you with that.

OP said in comments that there isn't a safety hazard.  "Harms productivity" isn't the same as "unsafe".

@NateEldredge True.  Although health and safety is usually broader than directly related to hazards.  Edited to clarify.

I checked a sample large university's drug and alcohol policy.  Here are a few items I found there.  The reason for having a policy is to protect the learning environment and reinforce the university's missions of teaching, etc.  The goal is to uphold the law and comply with the code of conduct, which has jurisdiction over what occurs on university property.  All members of the university community are expected to share responsibility for the members' health and safety.
One could also read the code of conduct.
A lot has been written on this page about live and let live, but what I think is being overlooked is that we're not talking about someone stinking up your hallway in a dorm, or showing up tipsy or high for class -- we're talking about drug use in a workplace.
I understood from your question that you are not asking whether to take action, but how to take action discreetly.
My suggestion would be to make a confidential report to campus security, without telling them that your supervisor has been aware of what's been going on, without doing anything about it.  I looked up confidential report to campus security at the same sample university, and easily found guidance that clearly states that you can report a concern without identifying yourself.  You could take a look what has been published about this for your university, to reassure yourself about this.
(By the way, I didn't understand either what the drug is and how the moaning and the smell are connected to the drug use -- but those seem like side issues.)

The OP probably has good reason not to give specifics.

I can’t answer from a US perspective unfortunately, because I’m in the UK, but I’ll try to answer your question in a more general context.
Basically, the key issue for you is that this guy’s drug use is antisocial and is making your working life unpleasant. The possible illegality of it comes into this situation in two ways:

You may in some jurisdictions have a legal duty to report it to the police.
If it’s illegal, you’re on extremely firm ground when it comes to getting him to stop, and you shouldn’t be afraid to escalate the situation until it gets resolved.

I suggest the following (with a certain amount of tongue in cheek in places):

Determine the strength of your hand: first, find out whether or not the drug use is actually illegal where you are. If it’s not, find out to what extent the university has a legal duty to protect your working environment regardless of that.
If it’s illegal, or the university has a legal duty to protect your working environment, you’re on very strong ground. Talk to the following people in order, being friendly and non-confrontational about it, but making the strength of your hand and your willingness to escalate the situation clear: the guy himself, other people in your group (who may share your view), your advisor, a trusted person in admin/HR in your department who can talk to your advisor discreetly without pulling the trigger on the whole situation, the head of HR in your department, and the head of your department. In the extremely unlikely event that all of these people are more willing to protect a PhD student taking illegal drugs in their lab than their own careers (this will never happen in reality), you have the option of escalating it to the central university, the police (if it’s illegal), the press (if the police in your country are corrupt), and social media (if the press in your country are also corrupt). Once it gets to a certain level, you have to start asking yourself who this guy is and why everyone’s willing to protect him - he may be a scary guy with connections (have your escape planned ahead of time) :) You also have to ask yourself if it wouldn’t just be easier to switch advisors.
If it’s not illegal and the university has no legal duty to protect your working environment, you’re on weaker ground. You can still escalate things, but more cautiously, looking for someone who might view your situation sympathetically and help sort things out. You should definitely consider switching advisors, if nothing else.

@djechlin: To be clear, I think that if someone was e.g. smoking marijuana over me in my place of work, I would feel that I was already being extremely reasonable in going to them about it first and being polite. I have no particular axe to grind about what people do in their spare time, but (at least in the UK) using drugs in a workplace is 100% inappropriate - where I work, someone doing that would reasonably expect to get a good kicking from the powers that be, and in my view rightly so. I would regard talking to them first about it to be a courtesy - and I would expect them to stop.

@djechlin: I also wouldn't say that I wasn't being confrontational - that's pretty confrontational already. I'd probably buy them a coffee and then have a polite but firm chat about it.

As an aside, showing your hand is actually extremely non-confrontational - the whole point of a show of strength is to prevent a pointless fight that you believe you're inevitably going to win. Various writers on conflict from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz have made the point that you only fight when you can't get what you want another way - in this case, demonstrating the ultimate futility of this chap's position is the best way of getting him to stop without the situation getting nasty.


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Why is a job interview needed if I am the only suitable candidate for a research-assistant position?
I have recently applied to a research-assistant position at a university in the European Union. I got admitted into the interview. However, I am the only suitable candidate to this job, as I could see by the official documents.
I have several doubts about this situation:

Why would they want to interview me, if I am the only candidate, and they find me suitable for the job?
What type of questions/discussion in the interview should I expect? It is a fact that I am not facing any competition, so what will the purpose of this interview be?
Is there any chance of not getting the job? I am really interested in the job, and I did not lie about anything on my CV. Can I still be considered not adequate for the position?
Is the interview just a formality? The original job posting says that the evaluation methods are curricular assessment plus interview thereafter.

"I am the only suitable candidate to this job [...]" The interview is exactly to see if this is indeed the case.

About the worst thing you can do going to any interview is start convincing yourself that they have to hire you.  They don't have to and if you don't perform well they won't, they'll just spend more time looking for someone better.  And being the favored candidate is a double-edged sword - you can be given a really tough interview to avoid accusations of not doing a proper interview.

The old addage, "something is better than nothing" is remarkably false.  There are many instances where something is a lot worse than nothing.  The interview is to guarantee the former and not risk the later.

I've been on a lot of hiring committees. It has been stressed so many times that we only want to fill the position with the right candidate. Sadly, this means we've had several rounds in which no one was given a job offer. So only candidate ≠ 100% chance of getting offer.

In my experience, we have about 80% rejection on solo candidate. No competition = no winner. Any mistake could be the last. Interview are like dating, will you date someone only because [pronoun] is the only avaidable one?

You seem to think that the technical/academical skillset is the only thing you need to get a job. I think you're wrong.

'the only' --> well it's like only if but not necessarily if? it could either you are qualified or no one is qualified. that's what the interview would be for. i guess the question would make sense that the interview wouldn't be needed if somehow you were 'the and the only', but how would anyone know you are 'the' without the interview?

There are a few possibilities.
It may be that an interview is required by the policy of the institution.
It is also likely that they want to get an idea of how you would fit in personally. If they are happy with your application materials and have no reason to doubt your honesty in that, they just might want to know if your personality seems compatible.
Yes, it is possible that you don't get the job. If they decide you are a complete jerk (sorry, nothing implied) they won't want to hire you and will most probably restart the search.
But, I'd advise that it isn't anything to worry over. Just be yourself and use the interview to help decide if you want to work with them. If you decide that they are complete jerks you will want to keep looking.
They may want to quiz you on aspects of your knowledge that are especially important to their work. Be honest in your answers, even if you aren't familiar. Be positive, of course, about your abilities and adaptability if that seems appropriate.

...and in addition they might want to give you a chance to see if you want to work in this team.

An interview is also a two way process.  You get to see whether you actually want to work there.  I've walked into places where I can immediately tell I did NOT want to be there... seeing people with dark circles around their eyes hunched over their desks and staring at their monitor is not a pretty sight.

If you’re not a great candidate, chances are you won’t get the job.
I’ve sat on appointment committees for more than one U.K. Russell Group university. Pretty much every time the view of the committee is we’d rather make no appointment, than a poor appointment.
Last year, a committee I was on decided not to appoint to a professorial grade post, despite having a number of applicants who were already professors at other universities - they were just viewed as not good enough for the appointing institution.
So being a sole applicant far from guarantees getting the job. The university wants to interview you to discover if you’re a great candidate, or just good enough on paper. And if you’re in the second group they’d probably rather not appoint anyone and re-advertise at some point in the future.

+1. "Only candidate" in the current selection group does not mean you're the only person who can do the job. They'd rather wait for Mr Right, instead of Mr Right Now. (Or Ms Right, of course.)

I am currently recruiting for three (non-academic) positions.  One of them is fairly unusual and we have never managed to have two candidates at the same time - we will still turn a candidate down if they aren't good enough.

@Graham: That's a nice ambiguity there; for a moment I thought you were suggesting that they'd rather wait for Mr. Right than for either Mr. Right Now or Ms. Right. ;-)

However, I am the only suitable candidate to this job, as I could see
  by the official documents.

You probably mean that you are the only shortlisted candidate with suitable background or with shared research interests etc. But there are more than academic qualifications when recruiting a member for a lab. For example, nobody want to hire a jerk no matter how talented he is.
I once interviewed for a post-doc position in the UK. Part of the onsite interview was to talk with PhD students and other postdocs in the lab for an hour while the PI and co-PI interviewed other candidates. I thought they just wanted to make me busy, but that were a mistake. There were 2 candidates being interviewed via Skype and they had to do the same.

-Why would they want to interview me, if I am the only candidate, and they find me suitable to the job?

To evaluate you further, to get more information that is not available in the resume/ applications,  to check if you fit with the culture of the lab, and so on and so on.

-What type of questions/discussion in the interview should I expect?

Only the interviewer can know.

It is a fact that I am not facing any competition, so what will the
  purpose of this interview be?

Having no competition doesn't mean you will automatically get the job. It doesn't mean the interview will be easy either.
In the SF Bay Area (or Silicon Valley as poeple often call), there is almost no competition for software engineer, data scientist jobs. Often a company want to hire 300, and they can only find 30. So if you "pass the bar", you can surely get into Google, Fb, Amazon etc. That doesn't mean the interviews are easy, as the bar is very high.

-Is there any chance of not getting the job? I am really interested in the job, and I did not lie about anything on my CV. Can I still be
  considered not adequate for the position?

There is always a chance for everything.

-Is the interview just a formality?

I guess not. You should prepare for it as much as possible.
Good luck.

"In the SF Bay Area (or Silicon Valley as poeple often call)" Originally (and etymologically), it referred to the Santa Clara Valley (South Bay), although its use is creeping into the Bay Area in general.

Why would they want to interview me, if I am the only candidate, and they find me suitable for the job?

They have found you to be suitable enough to merit an interview, not suitable to enough to hire "blindly", without having talked to you.
Expect essentially the same interview questions you would get had there been multiple candidates.
The interview is likely not just a formality and you are not guaranteed to be hired: The research group can decide nobody was found suitable enough, and either shelve the position or try another round of recruiting.

Many academic positions beyond the PhD positions are extremely specialised¹.
Even if the job market is saturated with suitable candidates on the time average, it may therefore easily happen that only one or no candidate is available at a given time due to statistical fluctuations.
In fact, I am aware of several positions that stayed vacant for quite a while due to a lack of suitable candidates.
So, even if your situation is not common in your field, it is very likely not rare, and therefore there likely are mechanisms to cope with it.
In particular, there are likely measures to avoid that one completely unsuited candidate must be hired due to being the only one.
For example, I know that many funders allow to delay the research plan a little if no suitable candidate is found or to convert a postdoc position to a PhD position and vice versa.
For university-funded positions, the flexibility is usually even higher.
I heard of some cases where positions were advertised over years until a suitable candidate was found.
I also have never heard of an academic position where the hiring party is forced (practically or legally) to accept a candidate.
This doesn’t mean that they do not exist, but given the above, I cannot imagine any mechanisms enforcing this to survive very long because they would lead to a completely unnecessary detriment of research quality.
So, I really wouldn’t assume that, just because you are the only candidate, you cannot fail.
Moreover, even if they are desperate to hire somebody, they may still want to avoid hiring somebody who is very likely to quit after a few months, because they are back where they started with some time and funding lost.
Finally note that even if they are already completely enthusiastic about you, they may not tell you and go through a regular hiring process to get a better negotiating position for the details of hiring (if there is anything to negotiate at all).

¹ The situation is somewhat different for PhD positions, where in most fields you should be wary why you are the only candidate.

Interviewing is often about cultural fit and how well one fits into the workplace community. It's helpful to talk with a job candidate and listen to how one responds to different questions, because it demonstrates one's communication style and approaches to problem-solving in ways that a CV may not easily otherwise accomplish. It is also a way to demonstrate one's soft skills, and those are harder to measure without a face-to-face interview.
Good luck, and Happy New Year!

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I determined a parameter for an experiment – shall I ask for authorship?
I am working in an experimental-physics group. They are going to publish a paper soon. So far, I see five authors on first draft (PhD student, postdoc, collaborator, collaborator, PI).
I am not sure whether I should ask my PI to consider putting my name on the paper or not. I was working on the project for only a month and then the PI gave me another project right after I finished it. I was not involved in any analysis of the paper, but I was working on finding a good parameter for the experiment.
Initially, when I was working on the project, I thought I would be one the authors, however, one year and half later, the first and second author of this project did too much work, so it seems like that I did nothing on this experiment compared to them.
Is it worth it to ask my PI to consider me in the paper?

I was working on finding a good parameter for the experiment. – Did this succeed? Is the result of your work used in the paper?

Yes, they used my optimized value to generate the initial setup

The only way to ask for such a thing is informally.  Or you can chock it up to a learning exercise to mention it first whenever anyone asks for your help.

Whether or not you should be an author on the paper is not about whether you did something, but whether you contributed intellectually. For example, a lab technician who washed the petri dishes and while everyone was working on the experiment in the background turned the dial of the radio to the station that everyone wanted to listened to (i.e., determined one parameter that was crucial to the experiment), did contribute to the experiment. But it was not an intellectual contribution, and so authorship is probably not warranted.
Without more details in your question, it is hard to tell whether you should or should not be an author on the paper. But, this is worth a conversation with your adviser. It's likely going to be a slightly awkward conversation, but it is one in which you can talk about the norms in your field, what qualifies as an "intellectual contribution" and why or why not everyone on the paper should or should not be an author.

I suggest adding an example for the other case, e.g., that determining an important parameter for the LHC may be worth its own paper.

Yes, that is correct as well.

Don't ask. If they think, your name will be mentioned in acknowledgement section. They must have thought about it. But, your work might not be substantial to incorporate you as an author.
Unnecessarily, if you ask, your own image in view of your professor would go slightly down.
However, you may politely ask about progress of that work like: sir, how is that work-x is going?

how do you know all of this? How do you know whether the authors have thought about including/excluding bagmk from the author list? How do you know what the professor would think of the request? How do you know that the tangential question at the end would be understood by anyone who doesn't know the context? Your answer is without any factual basis in the question.


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Are the Hardy-Littlewood “rules” unethical?
For the second time recently, someone mentioned to me the Hardy-Littlewood rules for collaboration (and on that very site). From what I read about it, they include the following rule:

And, finally, the fourth, and perhaps most important axiom, stated that it was quite indifferent if one of them had not contributed the least bit to the contents of a paper under their common name

How is it ethical to be a co-author of a paper you have “not contributed the least bit to”?
I was flummoxed when I read that, it would be considered a serious breach of ethics in the communities I know. Is that a practice (those “rules”) specific to mathematics? Or are they just not used any more?

Since the Hardy-Littlewood rules themselves were public, everyone knew what Hardy-Littlewood co-authorship meant.  The situation would be very different if I added your name to one of my papers without any intellectual contribution from you.

The cynical side of me wants to ask: what about the head honchos who contributed the funding and hardly to the content?

Read the complete rules here. The rules codify trust--note that trust is the essential prerequisite for the rules to work!

The http://www.math.ufl.edu/misc/hlrules.html link is broken.

@FaheemMitha: You can use the Wayback Machine to view them:
hlrules.html from 2012

Generally speaking, this practice would not be acceptable under today's ethical standards.
I don't think these rules represented standard practice even in Hardy and Littlewood's day.  They wrote them only to govern their own collaboration; I'm not aware that they ever even suggested that anybody else follow them.  The rules are notable because they are unusual (and, as mentioned by Anonymous Mathematician, humorously exaggerated).
If your reputation matches that of Hardy and Littlewood, you may find the academic community (and your institution) willing to tolerate idiosyncracies like this.  Otherwise, I wouldn't suggest trying it.

ACtually in mathematics is a common feature that authors are listed in the alphabetic order, regardless of their relative contribution (but I guess in most sane scenarios, rules in-out are similar to other sciences).

@Piotr: I think Nate is probably well aware of the author order for mathematical publications. :-) Perhaps you intended your comment to be on the OP?

@WillieWong It was a supplementary. The answer above may suggest that the Hardy-Littlewood is not followed.

I've always interpreted such remarks as meaning that the individual papers were just progress reports on their larger enterprise, to which both made irreplaceable contributions, and that they had no interest in keeping track of moment-by-moment relative contributions.
In particular, "on average", there was no misattribution or false credit.
(Further, the "not contributed the least" may easily be hyperbole, just to make the point.)
For that matter, if one is in regular correspondence with another, how to attribute ideas that develop gradually? I think their solution was entirely reasonable.

Exactly, I always interpreted the "contributed not the least bit" bit partly as humorous exaggeration: if one of them genuinely didn't contribute at all, they would presumably not be willing to be listed as an author, but the rule meant they didn't need to think or worry about relative contributions or try to establish a clear line for an inherently fuzzy decision.  It's basically a way of acknowledging that everyone involved thinks the collaboration is valuable enough that they don't want to haggle over the details of the credit.

I think the context of the rule is important here. The rules taken together set up a system of trust: that the authors trust each other to contribute fully to the project, and so (as others have pointed out) they didn't have to waste time with the nitty-gritty of specific contributions.
It is not useful therefore to view this rule in isolation as a license to willy-nilly add authors without contributions.

If one takes a superficial look at the authorship issue, it would seem unethical, i.e. one author does not physically contribute to the paper. However, viewing a paper from the perspective of contributorship, which I perceive as wider than the concept of authorship (which focusses on the writing, (see for example examples from ICMJE and BMJ) a more tangible part of the research process), the original described Hardy-Littlewood case is less clear. Since both authors work intimately together, it is clearly conceivable that their joint long-term discussions form a significant background to and lead up to the final publication(s). Hence they have both contributed to the paper even if it has not been explicit. The rules for contributorship set up by the Vancouver Protocol:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
Final approval of the version to be published; AND
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

may thus not be broken. It sounds as if point two of this list is not clearly enforced but if the last point is fulfilled then it is possible to view the second and third points as implicitly covered.
Clearly the issue of ethics in what I would call a positive case such as this is not easy to deal with. The ethical rules should of course be followed in all cases but it is primarily the negative aspects that need to be scrutinized. If both authors can stand by each paper they are on, I would say all is ok. I should perhaps also mention the consortia papers that emerge from large projects such as the CERN where authorships are bound by contract rather than actual physical contribution. Again, I would see this as a positive form of division of authorship which serves its purpose and although break the Protocol rules is accepted.

As I understand it,  the rule is really about uncertainty. If at the time a collaboration is established, it is expected everybody will contribute, then the credit is shared evenly regardless of how the project turned out. This is like when a group of treasure hunters agreeing to share the loot evenly before embarking on a journey. Under this interpretation, adding a new author who's done no work is not accepted, as the author must expect to contribute when he is added.

These H-L rules were but a part of the abuse of Littlewood by Hardy. Littlewood's severe depression was to a significant degree due to this sick Hardy-Littlewood so-called cooperation.
Here are but some examples: https://books.google.com/books?id=WwFMjsym9JwC&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=hardy-littlewood#v=onepage&q=hardy-littlewood&f=false (this web page doesn't let us "copy & paste"):
In 1931, Littlewood was first to lecture for Hardy-Littlewood class. Hardy came late, had to drink tea, and was pestering Littlewood about unnecessary details, against the Littlewood idea of his talk. Cartwright quoted Littlewood as saying that he was not prepared to be heckled. And Hardy and Littlewood were never seen together at these lectures after the said incident.

[citation needed]

It is my opinion that Littlewood was badly abused by Hardy. It's known, however, that Littlewood was depressed for long periods of time, already in South Africa. He was very strong in about every possible way except for being, in my opinion, sensitive. The mathematical nonsense in South Africa was not helping Littlewood. Then that "cooperation" with Hardy had to be very hard on Littlewood -- this you can see from several preserved different memories.

In Littlewood's Wiki, I cannot find mention of the abuse. (I understand Wiki is not 100% reliable). You'll need to come up with some reference. There is someone raised a LQP flag on this answer..

@scaaahu, I don't care about that administrative LQP (whatever it is) or any other such ugliness. I read quite a bit, and whoever can read with open eyes will understand. I lost a lot of my books hence it's hard for me to provide that bunch of references. It's well known that Littlewood was way above Hardy mathematically. Even Hardy's anti-application posturing shows that he was not in Littlewood's class. Archimedes, Euler, Gauss, ... were fond of applications. Applications provide you with advanced mathematical environments.

Thank you for the reference.

@scaaahu, u'r welcome! I looked just now, to assist this thread. My reading was from years in the past.