Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Re-reading that snippet from Lessig in the earlier post reminded me of something else I read recently. This is from Brian Hook and his experience with off-shore coding:

So I went to bed. The next morning, I woke up and the work was done. It was one step removed from having the tooth fairy deliver a working executable to me. In a bit of a daze I downloaded the code, compiled it, ran it, and it pretty much worked to my specs. Since I dabble in programming a bit I decided to dive into the code to see how they did things. Overall, fairly solid.

Very solid, in fact. Very high quality comments, written in good English. In a little too good of English, you know? So on a hunch I Googled one of the comments, verbatim, and sure enough, that code fragment was jacked from a piece of open source. Busted.

Or...not? Technically the terms and conditions prevents a coder from using someone else's code and especially code under licenses like (L)GPL, but if the code they're "stealing" is open source and doesn't have an onerous license, this may not be a bad thing. The problem is that this particular fragment was from a GPL project, a source of major consternation for me.

He goes on..

I was initially irritated by this, with this kind of "the other shoe drops" mentality, but then I realized that he handled it well and, honestly, did pretty much what most programmers would do when trying to get something done quickly and on-time -- he Googled it (shit, don't even pretend like you write all your code from scratch. Don't even.) So overall I'll call it a wash and chalk it up under "due diligence." For what it's worth, RAC requires you to use their mediation system -- this is far more practical than dragging out lawyers over a $100 project, not to mention good luck going after people eleven time zones away -- to resolve disputes, and you can see how many disputes someone has had and their win/loss record on these disputes.

Now, I will admit, I have googled for a snipped before, but usually as an example. I almost never copy and paste code. The thing is, when you are talking about LGPL stuff, you can use the library without affecting your project. I have certainly gotten whole LGPL APIs and used them so I could have one or two small feature points. Not efficient in your /lib/ folder, but oh well.

At any rate, it really does go back to that issue of the nature of IP in a world where Google gives you access to IP all over the place. Make you wonder if Google is an "enabling technology" and should be illegal under the DMCA.