[MobWalk]

Copying anything treads a fine line between intelligent and wrong in my eyes. There's two ways of looking at it:

1. Copying someone is intelligent. If they've done the work already, and you're building beyond what the other person did, then it saves you time and money to copy the code. By copying it, you allow yourself to devote your energies toward providing a higher-quality product, which in itself is a worthy goal, but at what cost?

2. Copying someone is wrong. Because they did the work, I feel that they earned the right to control where that work is used and who it is used by. Obviously, code that is open source is fair game, but to straight up copy somebody else's source code is unethical.

The way I see it, if you're going to copy someone, just ask them for permission! Most of the programmers I've met are pretty down-to-earth, friendly people who would be happy to help as long as they get some kind of credit for the work they did.

[KiwiCoder]

Yeah, I was thinking of the stuff on codeproject, dzone, stackoverflow. The places where code is dropped with the explicit purpose of sharing it.