[sillysaurus3]

Actually, it's an important point. One way to learn a given coding technique is to copy-paste it into your own project, modify it until it works, and then delete it and re-implement it yourself. (The "delete and then reimplement it yourself" is the important part. Don't just copy-paste code!) That way you can build up an understanding of the code as you go, without having to understand it in its entirety from scratch. Understanding it in its entirety from scratch is the better way, because it gives you a deeper understanding, but people learn in different ways.

Anyway, illegal is illegal, and copy-pasting from Tarsnap would be illegal. I didn't know Tarsnap was under a restrictive license. It's a shame that people will have to be so careful when learning from Tarsnap, as it's a paragon of modern C best practices, but maybe the license is shrewd.

Though I wish the mentality of "my competitors might steal the code!" will die its deserved death, since evidence thus far suggests it's just paranoia. For example, the codecombat guys open sourced everything and have been fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015126 (But of course that's easy for me to say when I have no competitors to worry about!)

[cperciva]

Though I wish the mentality of "my competitors might steal the code!" will die its deserved death, since evidence thus far suggests it's just paranoia.

Well, Tarsnap is online backup for the truly paranoid... ;-)

Seriously though: I never thought this was likely to be a problem, but given that I was spending a significant chunk of my life on this, I wanted to eliminate obvious risks to my livelihood. I like not starving.

But I've done my best to put the "reusable for a purpose other than building Tarsnap" code into the separate libcperciva tree. And I'm sure that merely reading code to learn from it is not a copyright violation -- there are no laws about copying information into your brain, thankfully. So please, read the code, and email me if you see any bugs; I wouldn't be offering bug bounties if I didn't want people to look at the code!

[Locke1689]

I suspect that your suggested use of the code would fall under the fair use statute in 17 U.S.C. § 107 and the guidelines from Folsom v. Marsh since it seems explicitly for pedagogical or research purposes.

IANAL, but if this were me it seems safe enough that I'd be willing to do it and fight Colin in court if need be. :)

[sillysaurus3]

When I first started programming, a lot of the licensing rhetoric seemed like much ado about nothing. "Look at all these people squabbling about who's allowed to do what with text! It's text! Sheesh!"

But one quickly realizes that the concept of software license restrictions is a fundamental reason for the strength and momentum of open source software. Therefore, it must be true that a central tenant of being a good developer is to respect software licenses. Not merely respect them to the letter of how they're written, but to respect their spirit as well. If an author wishes you don't do something with their code, then you don't do it. There are plenty of reasons why this should be the case, but the most compelling for me is that it'd be lame to ignore the author's wishes while using their work, even if the author won't ever know about it.

If people are still feeling tempted to lift code, well... Remember that you only get to destroy your reputation once.