Can we all please stop overreacting?

[Walter Bright]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> I won't discuss the details, but I *have* been accused of ripping off
> someone else's code.

So have I, falsely, many times. Perhaps I am overly cautious about these issues, 
but I feel compelled to be.

(I've also been on the other side, my game Empire was once described as the 
"most ripped-off game in history" <g>, with not only people making ripoff 
versions, but people actually deleting my name out of the source code and 
putting their own name in. Having a registered copyright of the source code 
saved the day on that one.)

> It was particularly hurtful given that my code was
> written entirely separately without ever having even used, let alone
> seen, the other person's code.  The accusation was based, literally, on
> the name of a single function.
> 
> And yeah, it really upset me to be called, more or less, of being a
> cheat and a liar.

I totally am sympathetic to this. It is just as bad to be falsely accused as it 
is to have someone take what is yours.


> But I didn't copy from them, and I knew that the accusation was
> baseless.  Rather than throw away my code, I double-checked that there
> was nothing that could be reasonably seen to be copied and moved on.

One of the great things about svn is it provides a verifiable legal trail of the 
evolution of the source code, so when and where bits of it came from can be 
documented if necessary.

Ironically, making things open source seems to greatly reduce the chances of 
code theft!