How to Deal With Stolen Code?

greenrom writes "I work for a small company as a software developer. While investigating a bug in one of our products, I found source code on a website that was nearly identical to code used in our product. Even the comments were the same. It's obvious that a developer at our company found some useful code on the web and copied it. The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code. It's just 200 lines of code the author posted in a forum. Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license? If not, what's the best way to deal with this kind of situation? Since I'm now the only person working on this code, there's no practical way to report the situation confidentially. I'm new to the company, and the developer who copied the code is the project lead. Reporting him to management doesn't seem like a good career move. I could rewrite the copied code without reporting him, but since the product is very close to release it would be difficult to make a significant change without providing some justification."

Comments

Re:You already know the answer

[petes_PoV]

You're about to learn what the business world is really like.

Or, depending on how the project lead is viewed in the company, this could be the fastest promotion you'll ever get.

Before you talk to anyone about this, do some discrete research about who might be sympathetic to your situation, who the lead's enemies are and think about just how much politics you want to get involved in

OT: Burning money

[Bloater]

Burning a $20 bill makes everybody (except you) richer. With a reduced money supply everybody else's dollar becomes more valuable. It takes a while to filter through to the labour market, but it does. That bill represent the wealth that you brought to everybody else so that one of them will give you something if you bring it to them. If you burn it instead, they still benefit from the work you did to earn that money, but now you won't be able to get them to give you stuff so they also get to keep the stuff and sell it to somebody else.