It was recently discovered by a local Turkish member serhat5858 and Soulsmasher that many of his themes were being released by another member as their original work. Upon investigation, the copied theme code was almost exactly the same, in some instances identical, except that the original acknowledgements and copyright information was missing.
This will not stand! There is zero tolerance for this kind of violation. As a result of this discovery, the member concerned was sent a warning, the reply to which was extremely dismissive. He has now been permanently banned from all PHPFusion sites, including the NSS sites, and his submissions have been removed. Not to mention his name in the Open Source community as a whole is now worthless.
To do this to a person who freely gives so much help and support to anyone who asks is beneath contempt. So, to anyone who's thinking of trying to do the same to make themselves seem a better coder than they actually are, be warned! You will eventually get caught and exposed! It is theft, nothing less. We've been quite courteous and polite in matters like this for a number of years, but we hereby inform you that if you get caught in behaving in such a way, we will take swift actions as soon as we spot it from this day and after.
Please note, that AGPL does cover Themes, Infusions etc as well as the whole of PHPFusion, if you as a 3rd party developer breaks the license, you have forfeited the whole license as such.
The only requirement the Open Source community asks of anyone wanting to use their code is that you leave any copyright info intact, that's it! Without this one hard and fast rule, the quality of the code gets diluted and lost leaving talented people with no incentive to continue.
We understand the overwhelming majority of members would never do this and many thanks to those who have reported such people to us over the years.
