it's not easy! usually I just say, "it's a piece of code written by someone else that we don't want to bother rewriting ourselves since it was already done, so it's as if our program was our website and the library is a link on that page"
to be fair most other disciplines find it bizarre. like “these people spent a substantial amount of time working on this code, and then published it for free, and you’re using it for free, and it isn’t cheating?!?!?”
I think there’s a distinction between computer science, which like all academics requires publicizing your ideas definitionally, and “software development” or whatever, where the think you’re making is not the idea but some piece of code, and you are in a lot of ways sharing your final product in a
way that is distinct compared to other industries. The open source movement is defining in modern software but it doesn’t really have any real equivalent in most other industries, and was not always the things worked even for software
Uhh it's like standing on the shoulders of giants in science. Except instead of some famous physicist who figured out how the world works it's Some Guy.
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