Have a friend who wants to enrich his coding portfolio but is scared of people copying his more serious code if he puts it up on github.
Told him it's all about open source and he could just keep the more casual code up there while giving access to serious projects on request from a company, but it's not very ideal, is it?

What would you tell him?

If he wants to improve his portfolio for employment purposes, then tell him that if his code is actually good enough for anyone to want to steal it, he'll have no problem finding a job that will pay him to write more.

Also just a thought, but putting only the *worse* code up in public might actually be counterproductive.

@fuckfuckityfuck both very good points. I might've put it wrong. For example he wrote a patient management system for his father's clinic and he's very proud of it and afraid people might copy/resell it if it's up on github. Not putting up his "worse" code, rather the more simple projects that he wouldn't mind people copying.

He doesn't want to be a developer then .

@alertJS You don't have to open source to be a developer

Had the same dilema, used git locally. Then I told myself: "Go on, copy the fuck out of it". Why? Because I care about people knowing me rather than knowing my code and if spreading my code (even without permission) helps it even a tiny little bit, then why not? Also I hope the person will be at least that kind (s)he will leave my name/github there as a contact if not full copyright notice. At least as a comment somewhere deep in the code, so that a guy who'd work with my code would know me.

And then there are people who use a a tutorial or a basic event and make that short piece of code GPLd, though there's almost no way how to do it otherwise. It's like someone'd license "print('Hello world')" as GPLd. -_-

@kian It's much easier to validate yourself as a dev if you have a GitHub account.

It's not 1997, most developers should have a GitHub