Author: James T. Walker
Date: 05:14:15 08/23/05
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As a non-programmer maybe I have a different outlook on all this. I believe that when people put their code out for others to see then they are allowing you to learn from their work. People have been taking other peoples ideas for centuries and using them for profit or whatever. Some people make a living taking others ideas and teaching them to people with no clue. (Teachers/students) Students are expected to take others ideas and expand/improve on them or even better yet come up with an even better idea. Copying peoples ideas word for word is wrong. The problem with programming is that in any given language it becomes hard to implement others ideas without using almost exactly the same code. This makes it easy to rationalize that just copying others lines exactly and pasting them into your program is OK. I don't think so. I think it's OK to understand others ideas well enough to make up your own code. If you can do that and it comes out exactly the same as someone elses code then OK. Therein lies the problem. Lazy people will want to say well I can write that but it's easier to just copy and paste it to save time. There is no way to prove it was/was not done this way. So for small parts of programs where this is common there is nothing anyone can do to prove this was done or not. I still don't see this as a big problem. I think cloning becomes a problem when you take someones entire code and then start to change small parts of it to make it play better/different. In that case I don't think trying to take credit for anything is appropriate except maybe creating a new personality. It's like changing the kind of cheese in a mouse trap and claiming you invented a better mouse trap. The really big problem comes when you take the entire code and then start to change bigger and bigger parts of it. This seems to blur the line between what is original and what is new. Then maybe you can start to take part credit giving credit to the original source. Just my opinion. Jim
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