Originally Posted by Kentarii
I agree that he might have crossed the line, but mostly in the sense in how he went about the process.
...
Just to play the devil's advocate I'm gonna throw some questions out there:
Would you have been honored if he first approached you and asked politely if he could create an addon based on yours?
|
This is where the line is. There's not really any room for devil's advocate here. All answers to any of your questions are basically, "No, this was improper. There's no wiggle room."
Basing your code on someone else's means it's not your code. Lacking sufficient transformation, it becomes a derivative work of the original, creative thought. The more you utilize, the more transformative it must be.
The method of presentation, while creative, is generally not copyrightable except at the low level (like graphics created for the job of displaying the grid, e.g.). The underlying code (which in this case was copied) is the important, creative stuff, and wholesale copying without permission is actually illegal.
Doing it a different way with a similar result is generally fine, unless you've shown to be a copyright offender in the past. I've done "clean-room" style reverse engineering in the past, and had to make sure not to contaminate my knowledge with code or even screenshots of what I was reverse engineering. I had to be told by someone else what the exact specs were, and implement that all on my own.
Requiring the user to separately install, then utilizing the installed code as a library is also generally fine. In that case, you are not doing any copying of the code, but of course, the code could get changed to mess with you. There are exceptions, like when doing so encourages the user to break some sort of EULA (and we can blame blizzard for not even being able to inspect your own computer ram).
If the person had viewed the screenshots and description here and created his own stuff that looked similar, that would've been great. Instead, he grabbed the code and modified it to suit his own needs, then released it as his own.
While people here often believe in FOSS such that you can adapt it to your own uses, and many even allow you to subsequently distribute it with the copyright notice intact, this was not the case here. Stating it's "based on" doesn't protect you ... it's outright lying ("this is my code") with a mere acknowledgement of the actual author.
Remember that
copyright gives a monopoly on distribution, and that was not granted by Stormknight.
The code is actually copyrighted by the Stormknight, and that copyright notice was removed and it was distributed without permission. I'm not sure if Stormknight published under an open source license, but if it were, it would still be taken down immediately for removing the copyright notice which egregiously violates the terms of pretty much every Open Source license. Because he actually started this thread, he obviously didn't make it public domain either (which is fully free, and does not require even an acknowledgement, although many people still give one).
Originally Posted by Stormknight
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?
|
Generally, swiping the look & feel is okay. If you find a nice way to present something and someone presents it in a similar manner, that's cool. The problem is if you use certain icons to signify something, and they swipe those icons or graphics (or worse, repurpose them to mean something else which interferes with the usage of your code).
Large chunks of copy-paste are not okay, and they also make the above look & feel not okay. By swiping code, they've pretty much acknowledged that they are ignoring copyright and stealing as much as possible. Viewing the duplication of look & feel in that light makes it not okay.