Is there one in the tool developers community?
Pertaining to what?
How to conduct oneself at work? – Most of the presentations I’ve seen about tool development usually talk at length about how to gain and not loose the trust of your users; most of it involves thorough testing before release and being fast to react to bugs.
Is it about being part of an internet community? – Haven’t seen one formalized beyond the usual mix of local forum/chat/group/community rules and general “don’t be lazy and don’t be an asshole” advice.
With recent trend of flashy buzzwords like “Coding Ninja” and “Rockstar Developer”, I sure hope “MAXScript Samurai” isn’t next…
Is it about being part of an internet community? – Haven’t seen one formalized beyond the usual mix of local forum/chat/group/community rules and general “don’t be lazy and don’t be an asshole” advice.
What does everyone think about people copying tools?
You would just be coping an idea not the code. *Here is a good example of…
3dsmax Scatter -> Vray Scatter -> Multiscatter -> Forest Pack
All do the same thing but have their own code. **
With this thought possess, why would anyone make a 3d application after the first one was out. *We would all be using TrueSpace and there would be no evolution of programs or plugins. *
That kinda falls under the “don’t be an asshole” common sense. Most people aren’t, but there will always be opportunists in any community.
My personal opinion is the following:
In the simple case of copy-pasting someone else’s code in their tool: if it’s not under a permissive license, it’s kinda wrong… also illegal. When the original author is fine with re-use, it’s still good courtesy to at least add a comment of where from and who’s the code is.
Implementing an idea someone has seen elsewhere (siggraph papers?, gdc talks?, someone’s blogpost?), but doing so on their own: I can see how that could be a source of friction if both tools or one of them are commercial, targeting the same niche of the market and both offering very similar features. But I’m having a hard time coming up with more situations where it would be a “dick move”. To put it in extreme: imagine what the field of rigging would look like if riggers didn’t copy clever solutions from one another…