It is a tough feeling to see someone else's design for a library that would be literally perfect for my needs, but I'm unable to use it because of the license, so I have to spend weeks implementing my own inferior version while carefully avoiding making the code too similar to what I happen to remember.
I'm past believing that I'm smart enough to always be able to come up with/reimplement a competent enough solution for all my needs by myself every time. But copyright still has to be respected.
When I'm forced into that situation from licensing issues, it really makes me feel like my skillset primarily revolves around gluing together other people's well-designed code, and being left to my own devices exposes my weakness in implementing something from scratch.
I'm past believing that I'm smart enough to always be able to come up with/reimplement a competent enough solution for all my needs by myself every time. But copyright still has to be respected.
When I'm forced into that situation from licensing issues, it really makes me feel like my skillset primarily revolves around gluing together other people's well-designed code, and being left to my own devices exposes my weakness in implementing something from scratch.