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What is the legality of /looking/ at this code in order to study how a large corporation with a large code base writes a Rails app? I'd love to study it but n
by syspec 6y ago
What is the legality of /looking/ at this code in order to study how a large corporation with a large code base writes a Rails app?
I'd love to study it but not if just viewing it is a gray area
- zymhan 6y agoAFAIK the only thing that's straight up illegal to look at in the USA is child porn. You can read bomb-making instructions, for heaven's sake. You can certainly look at this code. Just don't base a product on the ideas you got from looking at it.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoThe problem is how do you prove you didn't base your ideas on what you saw? If you never saw it then its easy to say you can't have copied it.
- vimax 6y agoCopyright is about copying. Are there any verbatim copies of the original in your project. Did you sign an enforceable ip ownership or non-compete agreement with GitHub about trade secrets learned while working on their source code? If the answers to those questions are no, there is a very long, very steep, uphill battle facing GitHub.
- npteljes 6y agoLegality aside, the clean-room FOSS projects won't like your contributions if you have been exposed to the respective leaked source codes. From the top of my head, WINE requires this: https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines