> Nothing has been decided in a court of law so saying that it's "illegal" is disingenuous.
There are plenty of examples by now of big chunks of code lifted verbatim but without attribution. Pretty clear cut stuff.
> Even if it's remarkably similar to another function from a completely different code base but some of the symbols or variable names or function name has been changed, I would argue that it still falls under fair use, and is sufficiently transformative.
That's BS on many levels. Changing variable names doesn't make copyright go away. It's just trying to hide your violation of it.
I am pretty vocally against copyright, but let's not kid ourselves about the morality of this. No attribution is immoral.
