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05/08/14, 03:57 AM   #1
Stormknight
 
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Join Date: Feb 2014
Posts: 128
Add-on code - the grey line of "based on"

TL;DR - I am interested in where your "grey line" is on people basing their addons on other people's work.

Like most addon authors, I am happy to help others learn and produce quality addons. I use many other addons as well as my own and they make the game a lot better. I'm also happy if people say things like, "Oh hey, I looked at your code for doing <x> and that's cool. I learned from that and am using a similar technique in my addon."

So we see a fair amount of addons that say they are "based on" another addon.

I see other addons and think, "Hey, I could do that better. I have some neat ideas to improve on it" and I may even look at the code to get an idea of which API functions and events they're using and in what context (I don't though, as I just don't have the spare time recently). To me, that's just competition and is ok. In that circumstance, I'd almost certainly communicate with the author to also let them know.

It's a grey line though.

So this morning I receive a message from someone telling me that there is a new addon called "Set Crafting Grid" that looks almost identical to one of my own addons. I've taken a quick look and indeed it does and, unsurprisingly, when I download it, I can see the majority of the code is directly copy'n'paste from my own addon, including comments in most places.

There's a line of text at the bottom of the addon description:

"A lot of my code was based on/adapted from the excellent AI Research Grid, so kudos to those guys and their handy add-on."
To me, this is out of order.

If the author had bothered to contact me in advance, or created their own design based on mine, then I'd possibly view it differently. I don't know.


Just for info:

My addon "AI Research Grid":
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info2...earchGrid.html


"Set Crafting Grid"
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=448



My grey line I think is based on the following:
* Did they swipe the visuals? If it looks the same, that's a big no.
* Does it include large chunks of copy-paste code? That's also a no.

So, I'm interested to hear what position do the rest of you take on the subject of authors using other authors code?

Last edited by Stormknight : 05/08/14 at 04:06 AM.
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