No, lousy work. Really, guys. There is no reason to applaud. There's a reason to be mad about it. It's another sad example how the "community" (or absence thereof) threads its developers (or ex-developers).
It would have been just so easy: Simply ask the author (Frank?) about the bug, ask him kindly to fix it, or provide ideas what to do about it, or for permission to fix it. Nothing is easier than that!
Consider you've created a painting or a building (as an architect) and somebody else comes along and repaints the eyes or puts another roof on top. That's simply not how you treat people that invested quite some time and had a hard job completing the building or painting in first place. You just damn ask them, that's the absolute minimum I would expect.
As an architect, you are even protected by law from third-party modifications on your creation, I believe it's not asking for too much to show the same level of respect to software architects.
If the answer of the architect would be "go, p*ss off!", you can still react on that, but in most cases, it was not when I tried (with exceptions, of course). And, on the plus side, it keeps such developers motivated to invest time in their work.
Stuff like that - pirating other's people's work and messing with it in the way they may or may not have intended - is not going to help! Actually, it may seem to help on a short time scale, but it will motivate nobody to invest some time into their old projects. Bug reports, on the other hand, or hints for improvement, may! Yes, it takes longer, but yes, it may be worth at least giving it a try.
I'm not even commenting on the correctness of the patch. I don't know. It's not my work, and not my bug. But the form of communication, and the way that some people even applaud on this is just something that makes *me* mad.
Folks, if you want to be part of a serious community, act professional!
Well if the architects creation resulted in a leaky roof and people living in that "creation" were getting wet, and some roof plumber fixes the leak for *free* because the architect wants nothing to do with his decades-old creation, what has the architect got to complain about?
Seriously. there is an important distinction between fixing damaged goods when the creator has no intention of doing it, and stealing the creators ideas, passing them off as your own and taking credit for the original work.
The latter is not happening, so I don't see what case the original author can make other than: "Its MY work".
And if that is all what it amounts to, then as CGX 4 was a commercial product that I for one paid for, that gives me as the paying customer the right to say "Sure since it is YOUR work, then fix YOUR bloody work, or get out of the way and let someone else do it!"
If coders want to be treated as professionals then part of the definition of a professional is that the buck stops with them for their work, and it is up to them to make good when their work is defective. If they don't want to be held to that standard, then they can't complain when someone fixes their work for nothing on the grounds that they didn't give permission.
