quote:
Originally posted by Time
Code is just characters typed out in a certain order so it hardly matters if you reverse engineer MSN or TB's plugins because a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters would eventually have written the same code anyway so claiming ownership of such things is rather pointless.
yeah right... until I see those thousand monkeys handing over their works to the Globe Theater on the six 'o clock news, this old saying is just something used to justify stealing...
In the real world there is still something like having intellectual copyright of code. If this wasn't so, then everything, and I mean everything, would have been totally open source and nobody would care if one copy-pasted some code and claimed its own...
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On the subject of the plugin: I perfectly understand the point of TB. Though I also understand Taz' point. But if you want something to be improved you first contact the author (like you did) and explain in great detail what you want or what you want to do (and not after you say: "I cant steal it so I reverse engeneer it"). If the author doesn't agree with it, you're on your own and this does not mean stealing code, but means finding out yourself. Even how inconvenient it might be. Of course it would be good if the author gives hints or pointers to know where to start (re)searching, but he doesn't have to if he doesn't feel like it...
About helping others in the community: That's all good and well, but I also have seen at first hand that if you help somebody by even trying to teach them how to do something, they often end up simply copy/pasting the code you gave them as an example instead of investigating and learning how something is done and figgering out why that example isn't good as 'final' code.
((one for Time
)
"give a man a fish and he can eat for one day, teach him how to fish and he can eat his whole life". Unfortunatly many men still prefer to be handed fish each day and don't wanna learn how to fish...)
I'm not saying Taz is somebody like that, but it happens all too often. And IMHO it is that what TB also knows and doesn't want to happen and because of that reacted like he did (although giving some hints/pointers wouldn't have hurt
and he apparently had a hang-over, also not a good state to give proper replies in) ...
/ 
