1-Up’d by a 14 Year Old

I got a ping back today on the Countdown Timer page. Tobias made a plugin called “Ultimate Countdown Timer” which is based on my aforementioned Countdown Timer.

Initially I was kind of pissed. Some guy, Tobais, had gone and stolen my work and then branded his own. And then I remembered that it I who released the work under a GNU/GPL license specifically so this kind of thing could happen (people making modifications). So I really couldn’t be mad at him. So then I was mad at myself for releasing it under GNU/GPL. But then I realized that this was a good thing. Some dude has 1-up’d a plugin that I wrote. So I wasn’t pissed at anyone in the end.

I took a look at what he changed. It actually wasn’t anything much. He even made one of those little charts that lists the differences between the two. He basically added some Javascript to allow dynamic updating of the timer (which is good idea, I might have to see about adding that in).
He also internationalized the plugin; which is a good thought, but if he’d looked at the trunk copy, he would have seen that I already did it for the impending release (there are a bunch of other goodies in the new release too, but that’s for another post).

Next, I took a look at his “About Me” page. Turns out the guy is only 14 years old. Jeez, I got 1-up’d by a 14 year old. Then I realized this was good: I finally had competition in the market (albeit a very small market for a specific type of plugin for a specific publishing platform).

Unfortunately, I don’t believe his model won’t hold over time. He has to go through and rename a bunch of functions and variables each time he wants to update his version based on mine. This is a time consuming process (I’m assuming) and isn’t a realistic option over the long run. Hopefully, he’ll just treat it as a branch and continue to improve upon it instead of just adding additional functionality to every version I release.