Originally Posted by Maul
And making an addon that works like another does not violate any ARR, just as Chevy making a car with 4 wheels, a motor and a steering wheel is not an infringement on Ford. If one copies code directly, then yes you need permission. If you make it on your own with your own techniques, then any author can make their own X-Perl clone.
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Even though the majority of authors are very protective of their distribution rights, it's my opinion that most seem to rather lax on caring if somebody directly copy and pastes a small block of code. I always told people it was fine to use my ARR code to learn from and to copy bits and pieces from because code is code and not art. You can paint a bowl of fruit exponentially more ways than you can write a section of code that does the same thing.
The only major instances I can think of where downright theft of code happened was possibly early on with some 'compilation' authors changing addon names in their packs and DBM directly coping boss modules line for line from BigWigs.