>A programmer can read available but not oss licensed code and learn from it. Thats fair use.
No it isn't, at least not automatically which is why infringement of licenses exists at all, the fact that you have a brain doesn't change that and never has. If you reproduce someone's code you can be in hot water, and that should be the case for an operator of a machine.
It's also why the concept of a clean room implementation exists at all.
I think the commenter you replied to was talking about using the functional, non-copyrightable elements of the copyrighted code. Clean-room is not even required by case law. There's precedent that explicitly calls it out as inefficient.
More important, the rule urged by Sony would require that a software engineer, faced with two engineering solutions that each require intermediate copying of protected and unprotected material, often follow the least efficient solution (In cases in which the solution that required the fewest number of intermediate copies was also the most efficient, an engineer would pursue it, presumably, without our urging.) This is precisely the kind of “wasted effort that the proscription against the copyright of ideas and facts . . . [is] designed to prevent.” (Sony v. Connectix)
No it isn't, at least not automatically which is why infringement of licenses exists at all, the fact that you have a brain doesn't change that and never has. If you reproduce someone's code you can be in hot water, and that should be the case for an operator of a machine.
It's also why the concept of a clean room implementation exists at all.