Here is an example of a piece of code posted to a blog which doesn’t explicitly have a license attached. It is a pretty cool example and something that would be nice to use in a basic winforms project.
Now that piece of code doesn’t have a license, but the blog itself does have a Disclaimer in the menu saying “Postings are provided ‘as is’ with no warranties and confer no rights.” with a link to http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/legal/policy/online_disclaimer.asp
This is definitely better than nothing.
Even better I think is this post by Jon Gallant on TypeConverter. At the end of the post he explicitly says:
Use of included code sample is subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm
This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.
In other words, you have no rights to what you just saw. You cannot copy and paste into your code. You cannot pass Go or collect $200.
Thankfully Marcos of filehelpers fame corrected me on what I previously wrote about CodeProject. Code at CodeProject explicitly gives others developers permission to use the sourcecode. There isn’t an explicit license attached, but I’d say it is closest to BSD. It just says “keep the original copyright notices”.
The bad example is http://en.csharp-online.net/Design-Time_Integration%E2%80%94Type_Converters. I found this URL when I googled for TypeConverter.
I poked around csharp-online.net and I couldn’t find a license or copyright notice for the site.
Remember to check the copyright on that class that you copy from some guys website.