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Comment on “This project violates the MIT license of Gemstash”

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A lot of people are talking about this being a teachable moment. I suppose that's true. [EDIT: or is it? This intern probably didn't do anything wrong? Rest of comment relevant to discussion more than the link.]

But I've managed someone who took code from the internet (multiple files, a whole sub-project, really) and tried to pass it off as their own. I pointed out they left the license info at the top of the files, and so it was pretty easy to tell it violated the license terms. I got push-back about it, saying they just wanted to deliver the feature (the code didn't do that, but whatever). I said I was glad the code didn't get deployed, and said we could work on requirements so a clean room implementation could be done. So far, yes, teachable.

Then he committed the same code with the license information removed.

Then I fired him.

There's simply no other way to handle these situations. It's unprofessional in the extreme to plagiarize, and is a lawsuit magnet to boot.

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