I'd really like to hear your comments on this. I've heard some of fsvara's already and I heard fabs is really angry... I would appreciate some thoughts.

I, personally, feel disappointed, stabbed in the back somehow, whether it is justified or not. I don't care that he has copied some of our ideas. I don't want his scandisking credits.

What hurts me though is that it feels like a wink for us, "you're not good enough for me". He could at least have talked to us or something. He has the right to start a community - but he has to understand it also means he rates us pretty low. At least as long as he can't motivate his descision. Him being not young enough is bullshit... but who knows how he thinks.

I'm sorry because I had the impression that he's a nice guy, not the Eric Provence style. I did have a feeling though that someone would eventually start his own "clone" of YPN, but I thought that would be someone who feels "hurt", like Polykarp.

Anyway, I'd like to hear your ideas. [addsig]

What I think:
We have built the ypn with great passion and it certainly means a lot to us. To be exact, I love the network and I am proud of us because we've proven something. Maybe not to the world, they probably thing it's nothing special but we have proven to ourselves that we are capable of making our dreams reality. This has been our dream for a long time, a community for young programmers and the way we implented it is seen nowhere else on the web. I'm not saying this is completely new, how can it be, we live in this world and we are influenced by others each day. We did not invent BBSes and we're not the first who share code accross the net BUT we have developed a site which has a personal touch, this is our implentation, it has what we think is right and it doesn't have what we think is wrong.
This is also not just a system, not for me and I am sure not for you either. As mentioned earlier, this is the realization of one of our dreams, a dream that we share and we have created all of this with great passion. I think we all love what we have created.

I think what abhi did was very wrong and if I was him, I wouldn't be able to look in the mirror with out shouting "asshole!". First of all, he lied to me in a way I've never seen before. He told me he was developing a website for his local-programmers-club in India. I feel betraded because abhi was always around when we talked about anything which was happening on the network and then one day, I see that he has put all those things on his own page. At this point I want to point out just how similar progsnet is to ypn.

1. "This is a site for programmers where they can hang out and share their experiences and their code. The group is a collection of programmers who wish to develop their programming skills through interacting with each other and helping each other out. Everybody is invited to join and help us and yourself become better programmers."
- Add the word "young" infront of programmers and you get our definition.
Now, I'm just asking myself, does it feel good for him? I mean, when we wrote that text, it ment something for us, it was our new idea and we developed the site because we had never seen something like it before and we still wanted one! This is not just some idea, it took us a while to work this out, it took us a while to realize what we really wanted and then we wrote it. It means a lot to me and what abhi did was really "copy" it and to the outside it looks like it's his own. He did not change the idea a bit to fit his needs, all he cut out is the "young" and I'd feel bad about that.

2. The message-board. Now, everyone has a bbs today and I'm sure you know that that isn't my point but the board looks, let's say VERY, VERY similar to ours: devided into programming-languages, general and projects, that seems very much like ypn to me. Also, take a look at the different forums. "ProgsOS", the BosOZ-clone and this is extremly funny because he actually uses the same words as we did:
"ProgsNet
To talk about ProgsNet itself."
An ours
"General YPN:
Talk about the YPN itself."

Then there are many small things, just things you notice when you're already heated up. But I will not mention them here because I think I made my point very clear just naming these few examples.

3. The usage of phpNuke was a smart draw. If people ever see progsnet and ypn they will think ypn is just a cheap copy of progsnet meaning "The Young Programmer's Network is a cheap copy of The Programmers Network". You see, we now look like the littlies-team, a bit like junior-icehockey in contraire to NHL. The site has more features and it was developed faster because he used a professional toolkit, phpNuke. Any php-coder knows that but people who do not code php will simply thing, ah well, abhi must be a better programmer.

These are my main reasons for saying that abhi is a person who deserves none of our respect and this is also why I said that he is stealing from us.

I might have freaked out at first and my point didn;t come across that well but I think now I've made it clear and I think my disrespect towards abhi is hereby justified.

fabs

okay... if it's not too late yet, I'd suggest we DON'T sign up for Progsnet to post comments there, just in protest. [addsig]

yes, of course, I will not support this a bit.
fabs