Comment by rerdavies

Isn't the whole purpose of publishing open source so people can "rip it off"? Just publish it with an an easy license (I like MIT). Anyone who strips the MIT license headers off your source isn't really likely to be somebody who's going to do something worthwhile with it. Grown-up programmers don't do that. And, I don't think I have EVER heard of a grown-up programmer claiming that somebody "stole their code". Is this something that actually really happens? I don't think so.

tbh, as someone who hires programmers, "here's a link to the code u can request independently of github" would be a dead giveaway that you are a junior programmer. It seems decidedly weird to me. Grown-up programmers don't really do that. If you want to share the code, then share it. If you don't, then don't. There's so much freely available source code available already that it seems vanishingly improbable that anyone is ever going to "request the code"; but if you just post it on github, there is a vanishing probability that somebody might actually find it useful, and.. well.. use it!

And if you are expecting potential employers to "request the code", don't. If you are a junior, it's a given that your code will be awful. Perfectly expected, and perfectly normal. Once you're hired, that will be fixed. Not a problem.

My vote: just publish it. Do it with purity of intent. You want to make code available that other people might find useful. And don't sweat the details.