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General Discussion Introducing GitHub

Natalie Nohel
Natalie Nohel
4,422 Points
Posted by Natalie Nohel
Natalie Nohel
4,422 Points

Sharing on GitHub Are there any reasons you wouldn't want to share your work on GitHub?

I understand the reasons for sharing projects on GitHub but I am wondering if there may be instances where you would not want to share your work on GitHub. I have also always wanted to know what the 'code' is in the developer world in regard to copy/paste programmers. Is it okay to use someone else's code? When is it okay/not okay to borrow code??

1 Answer

Karen Freeman-Smith
Karen Freeman-Smith
29,248 Points
Karen Freeman-Smith
Karen Freeman-Smith
29,248 Points

When you share your work on GitHub you are making it public for others to use. (There are licenses you can attach with conditions like "as long as you link to the original author" or "as long as your code is made public too"). If you write code for a super cool application you hope will make you tons of money, you probably wouldn't want to share it in a public repository (you can get a paid repository and control access to just your own team of programmers though.)

As far as copy and paste goes - mostly okay as long as you understand how the code works and can fix it if it breaks or modify it as required (this is from an employer's point of view, they like anything that speeds up development). I'm curious to know what others think about the copy and paste issue... are there ethical/copyright issues, or is it only that people copy and paste code they don't understand and can't maintain?