Comment by godelski

I'd say it's wrong in both cases, but we shouldn't ignore degrees of wrongness.

Copy pasting from stack overflow without attribution is wrong but it's also harder to claim "ownership" over single lines or small snippets. It depends how "obvious" they are. You definitely can't copyright trivial functions. There's a lot of gray here but yes attribution is always good.

But things get a lot less murky when we're talking about forking a project. That's usually nontrivial and non obvious. I think what's most important is that removing a license is an active decision. Certainly that would make a critical difference in a court [0]

Then there's further escalation by who is doing the action. The more power and influence you have the greater responsibilities. All men are not created equal. Men with more power can disproportionally do more damage and require higher accountability. So yeah, I care a fuck ton more about a government employee doing something bad especially while performing official duties more than some rando. The ability to do harm is very different.

The reason I dislike your comment is because it's dismissive of the action. "Other people do it!" Is not a defense nor excuse. It is even worse by ignoring multiple points of context.

[0] though protecting open source has been traditionally hard for many reasons. Specifically it's hard for small developers to take legal action, especially against larger bodies. But isn't this something we should want to be fixed? Credit for our own contributions?!