A lot of what I learned in the past almost 10 years (!) when it came to Sonic hacking and Genesis/CD development came from either studying other people's code that was public or at least seeing an in-depth explanation/breakdown of how something worked, and then learning how I could apply that stuff in other situations. Over the past few years, I have made a bunch of things open source (shameless plug), including old hacks, demonstrations of different effects, and other stuff. Even if the quality of the code isn't the best, I figured that someone else may find some good use from them. So yeah, I'm all in favor of open sourcing stuff for others to look at and study. As far as originality goes, well, in my opinion, it's all part just of the learning experience and finding yourself.
