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Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

You posted the code to a public blog page, with no attribution in the code or request of attribution from others, no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world.

Then you got an apology, and a second apology.

I'm confused about what you think you're owed?

The explanation makes perfect sense, the headers were obviously just copied with no malicious intent. What is it that is still bothering you about this?

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> no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world

No license means you don’t intend to share it “freely”, since you didn’t share any rights. By default, you don’t own things people shared on the internet just because it’s there.

That being said I’ve even seen people with licenses in their repos who get mad when people used their code, there’s just no telling and it’s best to just treat random sources of code as anathema.

I'm curious if you would have the same opinion about code shared on stack overflow?

I think GP is referring to the fact that an author’s work is copyright protected by default, and a license is needed to permit others to use freely [1]. StackOverflow posts are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 [2].

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

(Disclaimer: Just commenting on GP’s statement about “no license”, not on the specific disagreement or apology mentioned above which I am unfamiliar with.)

It's worth noting that the code in question was also open sourced and permissively licensed by the original author as he stated in the thread[1]. I guess this isn't really about licensing at all, just the original author seems to think it was rude, and also doesn't want to accept any of the apologies that have been offered.

[1]: https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/pull/684#issuecomment...

Per Eli's own comment here, the original copied code was straight up public domain and thus does not even require attribution.

https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/pull/684#issuecomment...

Correct. He did not commit copyright infringement. Just plagiarism.

> with no attribution in the code or request of attribution from others, no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world

The bottom of every page on my blog has a copyright link that you can follow. I dedicated the code to the public domain. I never made a copyright claim. I simply asked Addy to not claim to authorship of the code.

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