Comment Re:Um... what? (Score 1) 799
This is entire thread is pretty hilarious. 1st of all - without getting into the legalities of copyright... the entire programming industry today is filled with "developers" claiming to "author" code that in essence is nothing more than the reference to and utilization of pre-existing code libraries written by other developers (read Frameworks, Libraries, API's etc.). These "authors" patch together calls to pre-existing code libraries and then claim that they "developed" an application. Let's take a programmer who is tasked with "authoring" an image editing application. HAH HAH - today, odds are that such a developer doesn't even know the internal format of a .JPEG file and how to parse it in bytes... but because they utilized the Image class from a GDI+ library they believe that they have "written" something. Please...
Now - they did do some work and that product was marketable... but what did they actually "develop" or "author" at a deep level. Not very much. They relied ENTIRELY upon the ideas of others and the code of others to write their high level code. They may or may not have had the actual legal write to use those libraries... but they parade around as if they were code geniuses while the real author of their work is at Microsoft or Sun or Apple or at SourceForge...
2ndly, unless you are writing in Machine Code, you really aren't writing or authoring anything... the compiler is!!! The compiler generated the final version of the algorithm based on compiler settings. It "interpreted" your chicken scratch and actually wrote the final version of the algorithm that is in the binary (if native). So, by some of the statements being made here... if a code snippet of a relatively simply utilitarian task is copyrightable as an important algorithm... then please PAY UP TO THE COMPANY THAT PAID THE POOR GEEK WHO WROTE THE FRIKIN COMPILER!!!
3rdly... take a good look at development today and contemplate how RAD has dramatically altered the expectations of companies. Companies want products (which 15 years ago would have required a team of 15 persons 2 years to develop) to be developed by 1 person in 6 months. RAD introduced extensive code libraries and abstraction... and now we have Frameworks that change every 2 to 5 years and contain thousands upon thousands of classes and methods that are poorly documented and little understood, in their entirety, by the programmers that "author" their code with them. So, as the internet proves via numerous public forums, blogs, and help sites... programmers seek their "documentation" and "examples" online. If a programmer wants to find out how to do a Registry search using the newest classes and features (i.e. in Version 2.1 of the Framework, not in Version 1.0 thank you) and essentially re-do a simple task that s/he has performed via numerous high level methods for years via various languages and language library incarnations... then they have to spend a lot of time weeding through the CURRENTLY RELEVANT for 2 years class library documentation which is generally non-instructive and then waste more time attempting to figure out how to weave all of their high level calls together to get the final result. No one has time for that... so they do what every competant RAD developer and development shop does (as well as non RAD persons and institutions)... they look for examples and documentation online. See MSDN Forums as just one example.
The logic, demonstrated by many in this thread, is completely and utterly ridiculous. If high level ideas and their related code snippets were enforced, via the courts, for every programmer then no one would be able to write any code because the 1st person that used a high level library to do a simple task (say - search for a Registry Key) by writing RegistryObject.Hive1.Seek("StringOfImport") would now have a syntax statement that could not be utilized by others.
As Torvalds quoted from some unknown source "Built upon the shoulders of Giants..."
Now - they did do some work and that product was marketable... but what did they actually "develop" or "author" at a deep level. Not very much. They relied ENTIRELY upon the ideas of others and the code of others to write their high level code. They may or may not have had the actual legal write to use those libraries... but they parade around as if they were code geniuses while the real author of their work is at Microsoft or Sun or Apple or at SourceForge...
2ndly, unless you are writing in Machine Code, you really aren't writing or authoring anything... the compiler is!!! The compiler generated the final version of the algorithm based on compiler settings. It "interpreted" your chicken scratch and actually wrote the final version of the algorithm that is in the binary (if native). So, by some of the statements being made here... if a code snippet of a relatively simply utilitarian task is copyrightable as an important algorithm... then please PAY UP TO THE COMPANY THAT PAID THE POOR GEEK WHO WROTE THE FRIKIN COMPILER!!!
3rdly... take a good look at development today and contemplate how RAD has dramatically altered the expectations of companies. Companies want products (which 15 years ago would have required a team of 15 persons 2 years to develop) to be developed by 1 person in 6 months. RAD introduced extensive code libraries and abstraction... and now we have Frameworks that change every 2 to 5 years and contain thousands upon thousands of classes and methods that are poorly documented and little understood, in their entirety, by the programmers that "author" their code with them. So, as the internet proves via numerous public forums, blogs, and help sites... programmers seek their "documentation" and "examples" online. If a programmer wants to find out how to do a Registry search using the newest classes and features (i.e. in Version 2.1 of the Framework, not in Version 1.0 thank you) and essentially re-do a simple task that s/he has performed via numerous high level methods for years via various languages and language library incarnations... then they have to spend a lot of time weeding through the CURRENTLY RELEVANT for 2 years class library documentation which is generally non-instructive and then waste more time attempting to figure out how to weave all of their high level calls together to get the final result. No one has time for that... so they do what every competant RAD developer and development shop does (as well as non RAD persons and institutions)... they look for examples and documentation online. See MSDN Forums as just one example.
The logic, demonstrated by many in this thread, is completely and utterly ridiculous. If high level ideas and their related code snippets were enforced, via the courts, for every programmer then no one would be able to write any code because the 1st person that used a high level library to do a simple task (say - search for a Registry Key) by writing RegistryObject.Hive1.Seek("StringOfImport") would now have a syntax statement that could not be utilized by others.
As Torvalds quoted from some unknown source "Built upon the shoulders of Giants..."
