[euifii]

> no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world

No license means you don’t intend to share it “freely”, since you didn’t share any rights. By default, you don’t own things people shared on the internet just because it’s there.

That being said I’ve even seen people with licenses in their repos who get mad when people used their code, there’s just no telling and it’s best to just treat random sources of code as anathema.

[decimalenough]

Per Eli's own comment here, the original copied code was straight up public domain and thus does not even require attribution.

https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/pull/684#issuecomment...

[Sephr]

Correct. He did not commit copyright infringement. Just plagiarism.

[kamranjon]

I'm curious if you would have the same opinion about code shared on stack overflow?

[divbzero]

I think GP is referring to the fact that an author’s work is copyright protected by default, and a license is needed to permit others to use freely [1]. StackOverflow posts are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 [2].

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

(Disclaimer: Just commenting on GP’s statement about “no license”, not on the specific disagreement or apology mentioned above which I am unfamiliar with.)