I am considering adding a plugin system to a commercial project and I've found a Dr. Dobb's article that describes in detail with source code a plugin framework for C and C++. The article doesn't mention a license.Is is generally safe to use such source code in commercial software?
Using a Dr. Dobb's article source code in commercial software
licensing
Looking at the Terms of Service on their website, UBM LLC (presumably the parent company of Dr. Dobbs) reserves all rights to the material, with the exception of articles contributed by users.All [content], excluding any of your Postings (individually and/or  collectively, Material), are the property of UBM LLC.Which means that the author of the article must provide permission.  Since that permission isn't made clear in the article, you'll have to contact the author directly.In practice, it's generally assumed that, if you're sharing code like this over the Internet, you intend it to be copied and used by others, else why would you be putting it on the Internet?  But it's still a good idea to get explicit permission; simply putting one's code on the Internet doesn't automatically confer any specific usage rights to anyone else. The only people who have implicit usage rights for Dr. Dobbs articles are UBM LLC, who require those rights to be conferred to them as a condition of article posting.