Comment It's public domain (Score 1) 124
You can put public domain code in your project.
When a company like Penguin Classics puts out a public domain book with their own introduction, only their introduction is actually copyrighted.
The idea that the license covers all the code in your codebase has always been incorrect. And with AI, AI can take any source code and write a new version of it that isn't traceable. So it doesn't matter what your license says. Unless the code is super unique, claiming a copyright is absurd anyway.
I don't think the Open Source community cares "who owns it" as a lot of it comes from random users on the internet who posted it to help people solve an issue.
The only people who care who owns it is corporate.