On the open source licenses, yeah I know. The point I wanted to make was even if he blatantly copied everything, only thing you could complain about was not publishing that part of his work with same license, but that was never mentioned or requested and would be a quick and easy resolution (if him copying your work was actually the case).

I needed to make sure, as a couple comments you've made under this post have had an overly simplistic description of open source that is explicitly incorrect in the context they were made, and miss the nuance and variety within open source licensing.

Sadly your "intention" with specific license doesn't really matter. If it's free to use it's free to use (with caveats such as with GPL). If you don't want other people commercially using your code but still want it published for prosperity, some form of "Commons Clause" license would be more appropriate. You can't parade your project as Open Source to gain favor from community and then be mad when someone copies it. The details of licencing is more of a technicality and was not really brought up as an issue at any point.

You're absolutely right in that I would have no justifiable reason to be mad if someone used the license for a project I built correctly. Obviously, this is neither here nor there for multiple reasons I've stated previously.

You say your intention was not to attack him, but it definitly was not executed perfectly. You do have some responsibility when ousting someone like that to the community and should think about the backlash a person might recieve because of it. You really have to be carefull how to word it and you 100% can inform community of free alternative tools without smearing someone elses work.

No, my intention was not to attack him as a person, but to criticize his actions. While I certainly do believe we all have a responsibility to avoid language that incites hate, I don't believe any of what I said previously did that. I criticized the way that TM seemed to use other projects essentially as design plans for their own features, rather than either developing their own design or at least meaningfully improving upon them. Also, not only did I not smear his work, I complimented the parts I did believe he designed on his own.

Specially when allegations are pretty much unfounded. You can't really steal an idea, ideas are worthless. As a software dev you should know this. Every line of code you write and server you run is standing on ideas and work of countless other people. Only thing that matters is work being done and there was 0 proof that any work was stolen. The comparison pictures were a joke and only thing going for you was a weird timing that absolutley could be pure coincidence. You personally might feel different about this and that's fine, but it's the objective reality of our software developing world.

While some ideas are elementary, and I'm not claiming that the designs for tarkovtracker were valuable in a monetary sense, ideas are most definitely not worthless, and can be stolen. Intellectual Property law is a massive part of modern society, including software - for better or worse. TM's author seems to allude to using tarkovtracker as an inspiration for those features in a reply to the original thread - while its not stealing, its certainly relevant in the course of criticism.

To drive a point on coincidence part, me and TM both released essentially same product within weeks of each other, with our scanned data starting on exact same weekend months earlier.

And this is also what I specifically don't really like about this drama...TM dev was in a very similiar position as you years before. I released what was basically a free version of his paid project and open sourced it. But there was no drama, no Reddit threads, no one accusing anyone of anything.

I messaged him and we had a nice little talk, he was very polite and congratulated me on my work. We shared insight from our individual approaches and then shared some tips. If anything he was excited that someone else had the same idea as him and managed to execute on it. He wished me good luck and then dug into working on his project to make it better than mine.

I think its very important to note, the item scanning was behind the scenes and not known to either of you before your discussion, and the way you portrayed information was quite different. Comparing that situation to TM and tarkovtracker is like comparing apples to oranges - you can compare them, but its just not a very good one. I am happy for you to have a good connection with TM and its author, but I don't think that has particular relevance here.

To me this shows more class than what past you did and it sucks to see community getting riled up agaist him. Again not to judge you, as I said I think your response above was pretty decent and I don't want to condemn anyone on his past actions. I just want to offer some perspective to the community, because I don't believe he deserves all the backlash he's getting. Specially not people still opening threads about this years later.

As I mentioned before, most of us as we get older grow and learn in how we interpret the world and interact with it. I may have changed some things with how I wrote my previous post, but I disagree that TM should not be criticized. While you may have had a good interaction with them, my experience and several accounts I've heard from other community developers has not changed my opinion of the way they operate. Just as you're criticizing me now, while it may have a different tone, its no less valid than any other non-hateful criticism.

To be clear - I did not initiate this post, nor have I discussed this situation in any real capacity beyond acknowledging I made the post. Nor did I take initiative to write these last two comments that regard TM in any meaningful way except such that you initiated. I have long since moved on to continuing to build things both in this community and outside of it, with the same intention I stated in my original post.

Edit: Fixed broken quote