I would also argue that the code delivered to your browser when loading a page is absolutely useless to anyone or anything but the browser that parses it.
You can nab a copy of jQuery or another third party lib and that won't make a difference, but the non-generic code that actually forms the substance of the app, or the experience on the page, is worthless, because that's inextricably bound to the specific design the developers had in mind - something no one on the outside will know about - and is anything but re-usable in its public form.
Maybe if you spend enough time looking at it, you can start to reproduce the idea, just like if you spent enough time analysing the actual behaviour without even looking at the code. Anyone with enough skill or talent can do something like this by eye, and they won't start with a copy/paste of the original source.
Of course, this might all be beside the point, and I do like how we're seeing more *.js libs and fewer jQuery specific plugins, and in some ways I can't help but think the progress github has made is conducive to that.
You can nab a copy of jQuery or another third party lib and that won't make a difference, but the non-generic code that actually forms the substance of the app, or the experience on the page, is worthless, because that's inextricably bound to the specific design the developers had in mind - something no one on the outside will know about - and is anything but re-usable in its public form.
Maybe if you spend enough time looking at it, you can start to reproduce the idea, just like if you spent enough time analysing the actual behaviour without even looking at the code. Anyone with enough skill or talent can do something like this by eye, and they won't start with a copy/paste of the original source.
Of course, this might all be beside the point, and I do like how we're seeing more *.js libs and fewer jQuery specific plugins, and in some ways I can't help but think the progress github has made is conducive to that.