I don't think it's good practise, and agree that it's hysterical, and think it stems from unthinkingly believing Microsoft's anti-OSS claims during their decade-long freakout about open source and the GPL.
I think that attempting to convince people not to participate in sharing and studying code with the rest of the world is an evil thing that they did, especially since the GPL was the most popular OSS license at the time.
I'm absolutely not anti-OSS. I personally think it is against the spirit of the GPL to copy code that is GPLed, though.
I'm just saying be careful about how you do your engineering. This seemed like an inexperienced developer and he mentioned glibc vocally along with the comment "I'll admit that originally I copied this logic from glibc's implementation without fully understanding it, but I've now taken a closer look at the Two-Way paper and understand what it does." It's certainly not good software engineering to copy implementation like that. It is good that he read the paper.
Now I regret even bringing it up. I don't feel that I deserve your ad hominem comments or characterizations of my motivations.
> I personally think it is against the spirit of the GPL to copy code that is GPLed, though.
Why? I assume that you don't mean literatim copying, which is obviously the whole point of OSS, but rather copying with modification; but, even then, a quick read suggests that http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#section5 explicitly permits this activity, as long as you meet certain conditions. Maybe I should have understood an implicit insertion "to copy, without acknowledgement, code that is GPLed"?
I don't think it's good practise, and agree that it's hysterical, and think it stems from unthinkingly believing Microsoft's anti-OSS claims during their decade-long freakout about open source and the GPL.
I think that attempting to convince people not to participate in sharing and studying code with the rest of the world is an evil thing that they did, especially since the GPL was the most popular OSS license at the time.