> More charitably, “substantially different” is not a high enough bar when you literally just read the other author's patch.
Yeah it really is. If they rejected the approach and rewrote it from scratch that is sufficient. Doing a cleanroom reimplmentation with someone who had never seen the original patch is a good affirmative defense to protect against all possible lawsuits, but it isn't required.
> If you're writing an academic paper and come up with a whole new mathematical approach algorithm, you still reference the previous best algorithm.
This isn't an academic paper, and the proposed fix wasn't published, and it sounds like the maintainer thought the proposed algorithm was "poor" not "previous best".
You can consider it "rude" but under no circumstances is this illegal in any way.
Yeah it really is. If they rejected the approach and rewrote it from scratch that is sufficient. Doing a cleanroom reimplmentation with someone who had never seen the original patch is a good affirmative defense to protect against all possible lawsuits, but it isn't required.
> If you're writing an academic paper and come up with a whole new mathematical approach algorithm, you still reference the previous best algorithm.
This isn't an academic paper, and the proposed fix wasn't published, and it sounds like the maintainer thought the proposed algorithm was "poor" not "previous best".
You can consider it "rude" but under no circumstances is this illegal in any way.