open-sourceI am currently trying to come up with a senior project for college and would like to make something that is marketable to help recoup costs of school and projects.
One of the biggest suggestions I have had throughout college is to not do something that somebody else has already done.
This makes me wonder, what are the barriers on using freely posted code/circuits in a product to be marketed? It seems it would be wrong to use code posted publicly or open for use and make money off of it.
Are there written or unwritten rules on what I can use for a marketable product, how much freely posted code or circuits, a ratio, anything of that sort? Code on GitHub usually has releases on it that I could read for that specific topic, but what about blogs or Instructables, or stuff of that type?
There are various licensing option available to a developer and each license has it's own terms and conditions. A developer usually mentions in the code which license is being used for that particular source code.
Here is a link which lists all the different licenses available and what are their terms and conditions Comparison of free and open-source software licenses
Depending on the license being used, the user can distribute/modify/sub-license the code.
Note that MANY ecommerce websites use free code like JQuery and WordPress. The whole language of PHP is written by someone else but is completely open source and free. As Chiragh Dewan said in his answer, it depends on the license that the developer has claimed for the software (or platform or language).
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