That function appears in hundreds, if not thousands of GitHub repos. It's plausible that it's the most famous block of code ever. Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement?

https://github.com/search?q=float+Q_rsqrt%28+float+number+%2...

The only ways this argument could be less alarming to me is if people were bothered that it was writing the same Hello World as somebody else, or that it was naming variables "foo" and "bar".

Let's wait until we have a bulletproof, egregious, and inexcusable case of it lifting code until we panic.

> Are all those repos guilty of copyright infringement?

If those portions of code are not licensed GPL, yes, it is copyright infringement.

Calling it Carmack's rsqrt is an attribution issue already since it seems to have been invented a decade earlier and used at SGI.

Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 - July 2021 (625 comments)

I don't think it should be infringement. You can't copyright an algorithm, and Carmack's function is like six lines of code. If you just read Carmack's source code, then rewrote the same algorithm with different variable names, it would clearly not be infringement. Is it really so bad if you keep his precise variable names, comments, and indentation? How does it hurt Carmack to reproduce this tiny snippet of code exactly, rather than with a small rewrite?