the author wasn't suggesting that her code was 'stolen' or copied verbatim, but reviewed and implemented in a similar fashion. she could have offset this possibility by obfuscating her code, using minimizers etc but the functionality is there for the world to see and from her article i got the impression that she approves of this.

consider:

1. small scrappy startup uses a copied snippet of code, gets successful and rewrites code better which original author gets to enjoy.

2. big company wants to save implementation time and knows they can't copy code. asks author for licensing fee.

win/win?