What is the legality of /looking/ at this code in order to study how a large corporation with a large code base writes a Rails app?
I'd love to study it but not if just viewing it is a gray area
I'd love to study it but not if just viewing it is a gray area
You can read bomb-making instructions, for heaven's sake. You can certainly look at this code. Just don't base a product on the ideas you got from looking at it.
Are there any verbatim copies of the original in your project. Did you sign an enforceable ip ownership or non-compete agreement with GitHub about trade secrets learned while working on their source code?
If the answers to those questions are no, there is a very long, very steep, uphill battle facing GitHub.