# Best practices for using Licensed code?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-practices-for-using-licensed-code/276227>\
**Category:** Development\
**Created:** [August 22, 2023, 6:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-practices-for-using-licensed-code/276227 "2023-08-22T18:14:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![yanokwa](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/yanokwa/32/105083_2.png) [@yanokwa](https://meta.discourse.org/u/yanokwa)\
**Post date:** [August 22, 2023, 10:30pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/best-practices-for-using-licensed-code/276227/10 "2023-08-22T22:30:53Z")

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IANAL, but I’ve got a lot of experience dealing with thorny open-source licensing issues.

Making code open source or public domain is an explicit act. In general, you cannot redistribute or license code you find unless you have permission from the authors.

I say in general because if code is on a site like GitHub, the author has likely accepted terms that allow others to view and fork that code. More on this at [No License | Choose a License](https://choosealicense.com/no-permission).

If you want to use this code for your own personal learning in a private repo, it’s unlikely anything bad will happen to you. I would discourage you from making that use public (because it could be construed as redistribution) and I would strongly discourage you from adding a license (because it puts downstream users at legal risk).

Personally, I would contact the authors and ask them to comply with the licenses of their dependencies and put a license on their own code. If they don’t respond, I wouldn’t use their code.

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