I have a thought that I tried asking at SO, but didnt seem like the appropriate

Question

I have a thought that I tried asking at SO, but didnt seem like the appropriate place. I think that source sites like Google Code, GitHub, SourceForge... have played a major role in the history of programming. However, I found that there is another bad thing to these kind of sites and that is you may just "copy" code from almost anyone, not knowing if it is good(tested) source or not.

This line of thought has taken me to believe that source code websites tend to lead many developers (most likely unexperienced) to copy/paste massive amounts of code, which I find just wrong.

I really dont know how to focus the question well, but basic thought would be:

Is this ok? Is Open Source contributing to that or I'm just seeing ghosts...

Hope people get interested because I think this is an important theme.

Explanation / Answer

Correlation doesn't imply causation. Developers copy/paste code they don't understand because they're bad developers. The availability of such code doesn't turn good developers bad.

If there were no open source projects, there would still be forum posts with code snippets or programming books with examples. So we're back to my first paragraph: bad developers will find a way to be bad at writing code. The blame for copying and pasting code lies with the developers who do it, not with the source code repositories.

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