Is it OK to use sample code from blogs, GitHub, etc... in commercial applications?

Posted by eterps on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by eterps
Published on 2012-01-05T16:54:26Z Indexed on 2012/09/04 21:50 UTC
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licensing

When searching the web for a solution to a particular problem, I often find a perfect solution posted on someone's blog, or in a public repository (GitHub, Google Code). Most of the time, the code has no copyright information, nor does the author mention any sort of attribution rules.

I'm pretty sure short snippets are fine, but what if I copy a handful of classes verbatim (again, no copyright notices, TOS, attribution requests, etc...)? Am I under any legal obligation to the original author?

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