With VB 3.5 released for so many month now...
 

I think now would be an appropriate time to drop the 'you must have asked hack authors for their permission to port their hacks rule'

I worry it's preventing smaller mods, e.g. nested quotes for 3.5 being properly released where they can be easily found.

Maybe a minor change in policy now?

It's not a rule, it's a matter of copyrights.

I thought the consenus on here was though you can't even make a hack like that from scratch. That here copying ideas was wrong. I think we shouldd be allowed to perhaps "recreate" hacks from odler versions if we custom code it. Telling us we can't use an idea fro mthe past with out the author's permission is ridiculous, IMO.

Idea's are not copyright, only code. There is nothing to stop you 'porting' a hack if you rewrite it yourself.

Although you'll always get the accusations you 'stole' code from the other mod since they might be similar. Well, it is the same mod after all, some things will be very similar in code.

The thing is though, there are only so many hacks you can create that look totally different from another, after a while when there are many hacks, like you have here covering things from different angles and ways of doing things. It becomes more of less impossible to create a new hack, were somewhere on this board another hack could be said to have the same "this and that" bit of code in it.

If the other was around to accuse then they would be around to update their modification to 3.5x. ;)

I cant believe the level of ignorance towards intellectual property sometimes. Maybe you haven't considered the ethics of it or you choose to ignore them. Even if the author had vanished for 6 months it is wrong to take their code. Today I had giologist pm me and basicly say if I didn't port my gift addon for ushop he would "get it ported". I wasn't going to say anything but then I saw this thread and a few other requests by people to "port" hacks made by other people.

If this was open source it would be ok. But vb.org isn't open source.

I think Giologist is perfectly legit if he has a hack ported over for his own personal use. However, if he turned around and released it here on vB.org as his own code a problem would arise.

Well, that's a tricky situation. You're still basically 'stealing' the code for your personal use, but as you said, not much harm as long as it's not shared code.