Is This True ?
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Posting to CP doesn't make the code public domain. You still retain the copyright. However, there is a clause in the submit an article page that basically states that you give people permission to use the code without licensing fees and time restrictions as long as people don't remove you copyright notices or claim the software is their own. Now, what it really means legally is a question for the people dressed in blue. The laws will differ from country to country. I won't even get into the problems of code being posted from one country onto a server in another and then downloaded by someone from a third country.
Tim Smith I'm going to patent thought. I have yet to see any prior art.
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So I gather.
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John Cardinal wrote:
Someone can not post an article to CodeProject with license restrictions, as far as I know it's public domain once it's posted here. So technically speaking there is nothing to stop someone from taking an article and turning it into a commercial program.
I have tried to bring up this point on various occasions. People post code to this site (and other sites like it) with wide and varying restrictions placed on it, from completely free for any use to GPL-ed(!!!) code. Just because you can access a site with your browser and see code visible in it does not mean that it is in the public domain. The following can be found on the Article Submission page:
If you post to CodeProject then you retain copyright of your article and code.
You also give CodeProject permission to use it in a fair manner and also permit other
developers to use the sourcecode associated with your articles in their own applications
as long as they do not remove your copyright notices or try and take credit for your work.
(Emphasis mine.)There is nothing there that reads as "Public Domain". Also, many would consider outright theft not to be a fair manner of use. :) The application in question does not seem to acknowledge the original author in any way, shape or form, so it also breaks the "Code Project License" mentioned above. Author-placed restrictions are allowed here. How do I know, because there are articles that contain their own licenses that, after being reviewed and accepted, are present on the site. Previously, an article that had a author-placed GPL license on it won a competition on the site! If that is not a vote for allowing author-placed licenses, I do not know what else is. Peace! (Edit: The problems with licensing and assumptions regarding use are one of the reasons I do not post many of the things I have done and instead release them to a select audience under the JRTS-FSCL[^] - it will not stop a determined thief, but it should provide some protection if any FSCL-ed code is discovered within something illegal.)
-=- James
Hmm...I didn't know that. Interesting. I think that's completely wrong, no-one should ever be allowed to post code here that has any kind of restrictive license on it. The credit and copyright part about the article itself I wholeheartedly agree with, but what's the point of posting code here that is restricted for it's usage, kinda defeats the purpose and goes against the spirit of CP in the first place.
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Hmm...I didn't know that. Interesting. I think that's completely wrong, no-one should ever be allowed to post code here that has any kind of restrictive license on it. The credit and copyright part about the article itself I wholeheartedly agree with, but what's the point of posting code here that is restricted for it's usage, kinda defeats the purpose and goes against the spirit of CP in the first place.
Depends on how you look at it. Some people view the site as a place to get ready-made components (although the quality varies), others look to the site as a way to learn ways to do certain things. The last thing a developer wants is to have something happen like having the people behind BearShare busted have their source code, with their name on it, found in confiscated evidence. It is why I will not post any articles on strong public-key encryption - if the code is found outside of the US, I may end up with a visit by the feds. Having a license is like an EULA in that case - if you purchase a U.S. application that uses PK cryptography, it likely has a clause in its EULA warning you that you should not take it or distribute it out of the U.S. If you do, you are at fault, because you agreed NOT TO when you accepted the EULA. I would not post anything that could be used for evil (a fast SMTP mailer, screen-scraping technology, cryptography, etc.) without some kind of restrictions on it. And until my being allowed to put a restriction on use becomes official and valid (according to the site), they do not get posted. No one is likely to use my Hyperlink control for anything really bad! :) A high-performance multi-thread-capable SMTP class can become a mass-mailer really easy, and I do not need to have millions of people seeing
JRTwine Software, LLCin theX-Mailer:line in a bunch of their spam messages! Peace!-=- James
If you think it costs a lot to do it right, just wait until you find out how much it costs to do it wrong!
Avoid driving a vehicle taller than you and remember that Professional Driver on Closed Course does not mean your Dumb Ass on a Public Road!
DeleteFXPFiles & CheckFavorites (Please rate this post!) -
I'm a bit confused what the problem is after reading those posts. Someone can not post an article to CodeProject with license restrictions, as far as I know it's public domain once it's posted here. So technically speaking there is nothing to stop someone from taking an article and turning it into a commercial program. From the authors comments it appears that the people took several of his articles and combined them into a new application. Sure it's more than a little parasitic, but surely the author of the article could have just as easily sold it themselves. By posting the source code here they have contributed it to the public domain. I'm not saying it's moral or ethical necessarily, but I think everyone needs to realize that once you post code here it's bound to be used in commercial applications. This is just an extreme example of that process. It's easily much more work to market and sell and support software than it is to write it in the first place so if those people selling it are also supporting it (and have created something with more features than the original main article) then they are bringing value to something that is normally free and less functional and are not as parasitic as it might seem at first. I don't get why more people don't publish their own software, there are many authors here who could be making a *lot* of money publishing applications based on many of the articles here, but they don't, it's their choice of course, but if they choose not to then they should not be surprised if someone else does.
The fact that the code is freely available does not mean it is alright to strip all copyrights, change them for their own, take all credit for work, and sell it for $40 a piece. The code does come with a license which expressly prohibits use in commercial software. Sure, I agree, people will 'steal' and try to profit using source code if the can obtain it, be it codeproject or someplace else, there is no avoiding it, but that still does not make it right. As for marketing the project being harder than coding it, I bet I'll make a much better salesperson, than said salesperson make a programmer... :P
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John Cardinal wrote:
Someone can not post an article to CodeProject with license restrictions, as far as I know it's public domain once it's posted here. So technically speaking there is nothing to stop someone from taking an article and turning it into a commercial program.
I have tried to bring up this point on various occasions. People post code to this site (and other sites like it) with wide and varying restrictions placed on it, from completely free for any use to GPL-ed(!!!) code. Just because you can access a site with your browser and see code visible in it does not mean that it is in the public domain. The following can be found on the Article Submission page:
If you post to CodeProject then you retain copyright of your article and code.
You also give CodeProject permission to use it in a fair manner and also permit other
developers to use the sourcecode associated with your articles in their own applications
as long as they do not remove your copyright notices or try and take credit for your work.
(Emphasis mine.)There is nothing there that reads as "Public Domain". Also, many would consider outright theft not to be a fair manner of use. :) The application in question does not seem to acknowledge the original author in any way, shape or form, so it also breaks the "Code Project License" mentioned above. Author-placed restrictions are allowed here. How do I know, because there are articles that contain their own licenses that, after being reviewed and accepted, are present on the site. Previously, an article that had a author-placed GPL license on it won a competition on the site! If that is not a vote for allowing author-placed licenses, I do not know what else is. Peace! (Edit: The problems with licensing and assumptions regarding use are one of the reasons I do not post many of the things I have done and instead release them to a select audience under the JRTS-FSCL[^] - it will not stop a determined thief, but it should provide some protection if any FSCL-ed code is discovered within something illegal.)
-=- James
Good post. Now the real question is this. The codeproject submission statement (if you can call it that) is way more liberal than typical licenses authors include with their articles. Many authors expressly forbid use of their code in commercial products, others do not forbid it but require that the commercial software must contain their license. In situation like this which one overrides the other? According to CP 'license' any article can be used in any commercial software as long as publishers include original EULA/license, but if the original EULA says the code cannot be used in commercial software which one is valid and which one is not? That's the question I would like an answer to. My gut instinct tells me original author license is the one to be followed, not CP submission statement, but I would like someone knowledgeable to confirm it.
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The fact that the code is freely available does not mean it is alright to strip all copyrights, change them for their own, take all credit for work, and sell it for $40 a piece. The code does come with a license which expressly prohibits use in commercial software. Sure, I agree, people will 'steal' and try to profit using source code if the can obtain it, be it codeproject or someplace else, there is no avoiding it, but that still does not make it right. As for marketing the project being harder than coding it, I bet I'll make a much better salesperson, than said salesperson make a programmer... :P
I agree that the original owner should retain copyright and credit, I don't agree that they should be able to post articles here with restrictive licenses on how it's used. That defeats the point of CP in the first place.
JazzJackRabbit wrote:
As for marketing the project being harder than coding it, I bet I'll make a much better salesperson, than said salesperson make a programmer
Absolutely, but I'm in the business of selling software and the amount of sheer hours and work that go into the business that are not directly programming or design related are easily 10 times more even for a small business like ours.
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Ok, in that case those people selling this guys articles could simply change their copyright to say "portions copyright ORIGINAL AUTHORS NAME HERE" and still continue to sell it. I just wonder if the issue is about someone else making money off an article authors work (which we all know happens to some degree for every quality article posted) or about credit. I wholeheartedly agree that the original article author should get full credit but I don't agree that they can "license" code they posted here for only non-commercial use.
John Cardinal wrote:
I wholeheartedly agree that the original article author should get full credit but I don't agree that they can "license" code they posted here for only non-commercial use.
I agree completely. The bulk of the confusion comes from people thinking that source code and a compiled application are the same thing. Cheers, Drew.
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I agree that the original owner should retain copyright and credit, I don't agree that they should be able to post articles here with restrictive licenses on how it's used. That defeats the point of CP in the first place.
JazzJackRabbit wrote:
As for marketing the project being harder than coding it, I bet I'll make a much better salesperson, than said salesperson make a programmer
Absolutely, but I'm in the business of selling software and the amount of sheer hours and work that go into the business that are not directly programming or design related are easily 10 times more even for a small business like ours.
John Cardinal wrote:
I agree that the original owner should retain copyright and credit, I don't agree that they should be able to post articles here with restrictive licenses on how it's used. That defeats the point of CP in the first place.
Well, what is the point of CP? Surely I don't think it's feeding leechers? I would imagine it's a place where inexperienced people can learn and where acclaimed programmers can get credit for their work and exposure to potential employers. It is also a place where people share knowledge and help each other, if you can help someone with something, go ahead, if you have a question to ask, ask it, maybe someone will answer it. I really don't think CP is about putting food on freeloaders' table.
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:mad: they are selling some others work i don't think that company will survive and it seems that the motto of company is to just make quick money they lack the original work and idea i never heard a bunch of thieves making and sustaining in this competitive market they will not stop with polite emails the author should send them a legal notice :mad:
It is Good to be Important but! it is more Important to be Good
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John Cardinal wrote:
I agree that the original owner should retain copyright and credit, I don't agree that they should be able to post articles here with restrictive licenses on how it's used. That defeats the point of CP in the first place.
Well, what is the point of CP? Surely I don't think it's feeding leechers? I would imagine it's a place where inexperienced people can learn and where acclaimed programmers can get credit for their work and exposure to potential employers. It is also a place where people share knowledge and help each other, if you can help someone with something, go ahead, if you have a question to ask, ask it, maybe someone will answer it. I really don't think CP is about putting food on freeloaders' table.
JazzJackRabbit wrote:
Surely I don't think it's feeding leechers?
It's a place for knowledge, surely you aren't advocating that knowledge should be restricted in some way to certain people? The issue is really to me: should someone be able to put a restrictive license on code they post here? I've put a few articles up here, I've even received an email question from someone about an article I posted who was emailing from the domain of one of our competitors. That's just the way it is as far as I'm concerned, if you post something and someone sells it, great! If they put their own name on it then that's an entirely different story and should not be allowed to happen. You can't give away knowledge though and say "but it can only be used for this" besides being pointless from a reality based point of view it's not very giving of the person who posts the article in the first place.
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JazzJackRabbit wrote:
Surely I don't think it's feeding leechers?
It's a place for knowledge, surely you aren't advocating that knowledge should be restricted in some way to certain people? The issue is really to me: should someone be able to put a restrictive license on code they post here? I've put a few articles up here, I've even received an email question from someone about an article I posted who was emailing from the domain of one of our competitors. That's just the way it is as far as I'm concerned, if you post something and someone sells it, great! If they put their own name on it then that's an entirely different story and should not be allowed to happen. You can't give away knowledge though and say "but it can only be used for this" besides being pointless from a reality based point of view it's not very giving of the person who posts the article in the first place.
John Cardinal wrote:
You can't give away knowledge though and say "but it can only be used for this" besides being pointless from a reality based point of view it's not very giving of the person who posts the article in the first place.
There is a difference between letting others learn from your articles as well as using them at home for noncommercial use, or even possible for in-house development, and rebadging an article slapping your name on it (which in itself is a minor issue) and selling it. I agree, since you post an article open source, anyone who reads it is going to learn something new from it, new techniques and there is no way of stopping that. And I'm fine with that, actually I would encourage that. Because that's simply sharing knowledge. If a person goes to CP to learn about regexes, he probably does it because his job requires it, and he will utilize what he learned from CP, but if he is anyway decent, he is not going to copy the article/project outright and sell it. What the guy in question did, he simply repackaged already written app, added one minor feature and sold it. That is crossing the line. That is not learning, nor sharing, that's stealing.
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Steal copyrighted software is a criminal act; this can be resolved with money, jail or both. Under the law stealing software from Microsoft or from a small guy has the same implications. Publishing an article on CP when the publisher does no give free use for commercial propose means that the publisher show the source of the project and it depending of the license it can be use to create a derivate projects as long the derivate project keep the original licensing, Open Source no commercial in this case. I saw a post that said that whatever you put on CP is for public domain, no… I don’t share that. People like Andrew Kirillov. And many more (me inclusive) spend hundred of hours on projects and they are released for different motives, as author public exposure, share knowledge or many more reasons, usually there are no restrictions for small projects, but usually authors put license restriction on projects that required many time/research and also when there are no free or similar open source projects on Internet. If CP doesn’t give full support to keep the copyright ownership and give the free will to the publisher to put under which license the project is released, CP will became a site where you come to steal software and publisher won’t feel confident to publish excellent articles like Camera Vision, in which case the quality of the project will be seriously affected where later the more interesting article will be how to capture a screenshot form Windows. I’ll follow this thread and I see how this all finish. If would be my case I could do the following, with two choices. 1) Not recommended, start to send e-mails to shutdown the project every day, threat about sue, tell a lawyer to send a letter about the criminal implications, until the project is shutdown and keep track of the company if it tries to create a “new” project that looks like yours and start legal actions in that case. 2) Recommended, start to send subtle emails every 4 or 5 months, nothing hard, just friendly like “please, could you remove the project because I didn’t give authorization yet to be used as commercial product” and so on, keep track of everything, web pages, where the project is published, links, advertisement, EVERYTHING. And wait one year or two, if this company still is selling the software is because they did a good amount of money about it, if you take immediately action you won’t get a dime and also you will have to pay to your layer. After one or two years take a layer, share the case with the lay
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Steal copyrighted software is a criminal act; this can be resolved with money, jail or both. Under the law stealing software from Microsoft or from a small guy has the same implications. Publishing an article on CP when the publisher does no give free use for commercial propose means that the publisher show the source of the project and it depending of the license it can be use to create a derivate projects as long the derivate project keep the original licensing, Open Source no commercial in this case. I saw a post that said that whatever you put on CP is for public domain, no… I don’t share that. People like Andrew Kirillov. And many more (me inclusive) spend hundred of hours on projects and they are released for different motives, as author public exposure, share knowledge or many more reasons, usually there are no restrictions for small projects, but usually authors put license restriction on projects that required many time/research and also when there are no free or similar open source projects on Internet. If CP doesn’t give full support to keep the copyright ownership and give the free will to the publisher to put under which license the project is released, CP will became a site where you come to steal software and publisher won’t feel confident to publish excellent articles like Camera Vision, in which case the quality of the project will be seriously affected where later the more interesting article will be how to capture a screenshot form Windows. I’ll follow this thread and I see how this all finish. If would be my case I could do the following, with two choices. 1) Not recommended, start to send e-mails to shutdown the project every day, threat about sue, tell a lawyer to send a letter about the criminal implications, until the project is shutdown and keep track of the company if it tries to create a “new” project that looks like yours and start legal actions in that case. 2) Recommended, start to send subtle emails every 4 or 5 months, nothing hard, just friendly like “please, could you remove the project because I didn’t give authorization yet to be used as commercial product” and so on, keep track of everything, web pages, where the project is published, links, advertisement, EVERYTHING. And wait one year or two, if this company still is selling the software is because they did a good amount of money about it, if you take immediately action you won’t get a dime and also you will have to pay to your layer. After one or two years take a layer, share the case with the lay
Andrew you have a possible golden mine there, I hope you can take adventage of it.
-- If you think the chess rules are not fair, first beat Anand, Kasparov and Karpov then you can change them. Moral is, don't question the work of others if you don't know the reason why they did it.
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John Cardinal wrote:
You can't give away knowledge though and say "but it can only be used for this" besides being pointless from a reality based point of view it's not very giving of the person who posts the article in the first place.
There is a difference between letting others learn from your articles as well as using them at home for noncommercial use, or even possible for in-house development, and rebadging an article slapping your name on it (which in itself is a minor issue) and selling it. I agree, since you post an article open source, anyone who reads it is going to learn something new from it, new techniques and there is no way of stopping that. And I'm fine with that, actually I would encourage that. Because that's simply sharing knowledge. If a person goes to CP to learn about regexes, he probably does it because his job requires it, and he will utilize what he learned from CP, but if he is anyway decent, he is not going to copy the article/project outright and sell it. What the guy in question did, he simply repackaged already written app, added one minor feature and sold it. That is crossing the line. That is not learning, nor sharing, that's stealing.
No one (afaik) disagrees with what your saying, we've moved on from that point to the fact that article posters can apparently put a restrictive license on any article's code they post here which was news to me and something I don't agree with at all. I think it's fine that an article writer retains copyright for the article, but licensing a code sample or snippet or sample application? That's way over the line for a learning site like this one.
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No one (afaik) disagrees with what your saying, we've moved on from that point to the fact that article posters can apparently put a restrictive license on any article's code they post here which was news to me and something I don't agree with at all. I think it's fine that an article writer retains copyright for the article, but licensing a code sample or snippet or sample application? That's way over the line for a learning site like this one.
Then probably the quality of articles will be affected, because why spend a lot of time/effort in put an article for somebody else to come steal and sell your work. If I don't feel protected why I would post deep technical articles?
-- If you think the chess rules are not fair, first beat Anand, Kasparov and Karpov then you can change them. Moral is, don't question the work of others if you don't know the reason why they did it.
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Then probably the quality of articles will be affected, because why spend a lot of time/effort in put an article for somebody else to come steal and sell your work. If I don't feel protected why I would post deep technical articles?
-- If you think the chess rules are not fair, first beat Anand, Kasparov and Karpov then you can change them. Moral is, don't question the work of others if you don't know the reason why they did it.
Let's be realistic here, a license is not a patent. If we take your conclusion then it should be perfectly fine for anyone to post an article here and "license" it to exclude usage in commercial applications. If that's the case then I think CodeProject should have a license tag so that we commercial developers can filter *OUT* articles with restrictive licenses so that there can be no one coming after us for simply reading the article with a lawsuit at a later point in time as it seems you are advocating in your other post. Indeed many of the articles posted here are *from* commercial developers that take time out of their own money making ventures to write and post the article in the first place. No I simply can not agree, putting restrictive licenses on articles and sample code here demeans the whole site and aside from being a potential source of lawsuit revenue as you suggest in your other post I see no useful purpose for it.
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Steal copyrighted software is a criminal act; this can be resolved with money, jail or both. Under the law stealing software from Microsoft or from a small guy has the same implications. Publishing an article on CP when the publisher does no give free use for commercial propose means that the publisher show the source of the project and it depending of the license it can be use to create a derivate projects as long the derivate project keep the original licensing, Open Source no commercial in this case. I saw a post that said that whatever you put on CP is for public domain, no… I don’t share that. People like Andrew Kirillov. And many more (me inclusive) spend hundred of hours on projects and they are released for different motives, as author public exposure, share knowledge or many more reasons, usually there are no restrictions for small projects, but usually authors put license restriction on projects that required many time/research and also when there are no free or similar open source projects on Internet. If CP doesn’t give full support to keep the copyright ownership and give the free will to the publisher to put under which license the project is released, CP will became a site where you come to steal software and publisher won’t feel confident to publish excellent articles like Camera Vision, in which case the quality of the project will be seriously affected where later the more interesting article will be how to capture a screenshot form Windows. I’ll follow this thread and I see how this all finish. If would be my case I could do the following, with two choices. 1) Not recommended, start to send e-mails to shutdown the project every day, threat about sue, tell a lawyer to send a letter about the criminal implications, until the project is shutdown and keep track of the company if it tries to create a “new” project that looks like yours and start legal actions in that case. 2) Recommended, start to send subtle emails every 4 or 5 months, nothing hard, just friendly like “please, could you remove the project because I didn’t give authorization yet to be used as commercial product” and so on, keep track of everything, web pages, where the project is published, links, advertisement, EVERYTHING. And wait one year or two, if this company still is selling the software is because they did a good amount of money about it, if you take immediately action you won’t get a dime and also you will have to pay to your layer. After one or two years take a layer, share the case with the lay
Putting aside the original incident this thread is referring to which is pretty clear cut and wrong by any definition I'm getting a very bad feeling from what you are saying: I just want to get this clear from you, what you are saying in essence is that it's a useful source of revenue to post articles here with a non commercial license and then sue people who make commercial software and have used or are suspected of using the contents of that article? Does this mean as a commercial software developer I should carefully read the licensing of every article and it's samples *before* I read the article itself because once that ideas in my head it could make it into an application and a lawsuit is on it's way? What you are proposing is a good way to kill off this site entirely. It's a slippery slope you are taking us down and I frankly suggest that CodeProject not accept any future articles that have a restrictive license of any kind attached to them.
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Putting aside the original incident this thread is referring to which is pretty clear cut and wrong by any definition I'm getting a very bad feeling from what you are saying: I just want to get this clear from you, what you are saying in essence is that it's a useful source of revenue to post articles here with a non commercial license and then sue people who make commercial software and have used or are suspected of using the contents of that article? Does this mean as a commercial software developer I should carefully read the licensing of every article and it's samples *before* I read the article itself because once that ideas in my head it could make it into an application and a lawsuit is on it's way? What you are proposing is a good way to kill off this site entirely. It's a slippery slope you are taking us down and I frankly suggest that CodeProject not accept any future articles that have a restrictive license of any kind attached to them.
Licenses against the popular belief are not made to put restriction, instead are made to protect the author and the public domain. There are many licenses types like this http://creativecommons.org/license/ We can’t put aside the original incident, because is what this thread is about, under different case different thing can be say. CP is about share information, techniques, source code and forums, it is not a source code/project fountain to come get whatever is here and go. Andrew with the “restrictive license” is giving away 95% of the project, a programmer with a minimal idea and a little bit of moral can take 100% of the techniques used and create his own product in no time, but instead people like those takes the product wrap it and sell it, they know perfectly what they are doing for that reason is a criminal act and shall be punished. No one will come to you if you learn how it is done and redo it, in fact there are many reverse engineer techniques that are not considered against the law because the product DOES NOT share the IP with the original product. If you plan to use the source code from an article, ALWAYS you should read under which license it is given, it will take just one minute. And anyway if the article has restrictive commercial license always you can learn how is done and do it your self… “open source no commercial” is just telling you “ehh come on everything is already there, just learn how is done and do it on your own way” What kind of restriction do you see there? aside that you can't copy and paste? > what you are saying in essence is that it's a useful source of revenue to post articles here with a non commercial license and then sue people who make commercial software and have used or are suspected of using the contents of that article? You are misunderstanding what I said, if the article has a no commercial use, still you can do whatever you want with it, but it a crime if you wrap it and sell it like those guys are doing, now if those guys are committing a crime and they KNOW IT, then it is ok to play the same game, if you see offensive try to get money of it, then also you can try to go for a penal act and skip the civil. In a car you can drive to 100MPH and probably you will get a ticket and also jail inclusive if you do it on the streets or freeway, and what is the excuse? I didn’t read the DMV manual and the car gives me the horsepower to do it then “means” I can do it, and that’s not right. > Does this mean as a commercial software developer I
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Licenses against the popular belief are not made to put restriction, instead are made to protect the author and the public domain. There are many licenses types like this http://creativecommons.org/license/ We can’t put aside the original incident, because is what this thread is about, under different case different thing can be say. CP is about share information, techniques, source code and forums, it is not a source code/project fountain to come get whatever is here and go. Andrew with the “restrictive license” is giving away 95% of the project, a programmer with a minimal idea and a little bit of moral can take 100% of the techniques used and create his own product in no time, but instead people like those takes the product wrap it and sell it, they know perfectly what they are doing for that reason is a criminal act and shall be punished. No one will come to you if you learn how it is done and redo it, in fact there are many reverse engineer techniques that are not considered against the law because the product DOES NOT share the IP with the original product. If you plan to use the source code from an article, ALWAYS you should read under which license it is given, it will take just one minute. And anyway if the article has restrictive commercial license always you can learn how is done and do it your self… “open source no commercial” is just telling you “ehh come on everything is already there, just learn how is done and do it on your own way” What kind of restriction do you see there? aside that you can't copy and paste? > what you are saying in essence is that it's a useful source of revenue to post articles here with a non commercial license and then sue people who make commercial software and have used or are suspected of using the contents of that article? You are misunderstanding what I said, if the article has a no commercial use, still you can do whatever you want with it, but it a crime if you wrap it and sell it like those guys are doing, now if those guys are committing a crime and they KNOW IT, then it is ok to play the same game, if you see offensive try to get money of it, then also you can try to go for a penal act and skip the civil. In a car you can drive to 100MPH and probably you will get a ticket and also jail inclusive if you do it on the streets or freeway, and what is the excuse? I didn’t read the DMV manual and the car gives me the horsepower to do it then “means” I can do it, and that’s not right. > Does this mean as a commercial software developer I
I'm not sure that you understand how risk averse commercial companies are. I would say it's probably a fact that a high number of people who come to CodeProject to learn something are employed working programmers. If their bosses find out they are going to a site and reading and using techniques illustrated in articles that have a no commercial usage license attached to them, they will quickly block all access to CodeProject. It's just not worth the risk to them. What you are saying is that if someone want's to use an idea in an article "licensed" for no commercial usage in a commercial application they should just take the idea and re-write the code. Let's suppose that person has a question about the technique in the article and posts it with the article forum. There is now a clear record that a person working for a commercial company has read the article. Now let's say they take the idea and rewrite it as you advocate and use it in a commercial product. It's not hard to imagine the author of the article seeing the finished commercial application that has a feature that does exactly what is outlined in the article and decides to sue that company becuase they "stole" the code. In the climate we live in with people suing everyone else at the drop of a hat even the merest hint of a potential lawsuit is enough to convince any reputable company that they should avoid CodeProject like the plague.