By bloid
via ask.slashdot.org
Published: Nov 29 2007 / 01:48
I work for a small company as a software developer. While investigating a bug in one of our products, I found source code on a website that was nearly identical to code used in our product. Even the comments were the same. It's obvious that a developer at our company found some useful code on the web and copied it. The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code. It's just 200 lines of code the author posted in a forum. Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
Comments
bloid replied ago:
It's slashdot, so expect comments from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it's an interesting point all the same...
dzonelurker replied ago:
Is he really talking about "200 lines of code the author posted in a forum" that has been "stolen"?
amphi replied ago:
Yes, he is. However, it's a valid concern. Just posting your code on some forum (or your blog) doesn't make it public domain automatically.
For this reason I put some default license on my page, which is used unless otherwise stated. I went for a zero(!) clause bsd-style license (aka I don't give a f-word).
You can read the license over here:
http://kaioa.com/node/31
raveman replied ago:
lol, funny story :D
i think you should beat up your boss and make him re-write it. Why does he care? i have no idea.
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