Comment by rglover
7 hours ago
This isn't stealing in the "good artists copy, great artists steal" sense. This is just straight copying/plagiarism.
To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."
The original idea probably came from T.S. Eliot who said "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Imitation is surface level, but stealing here means to take inspiration and make it your own, transformation.