Thanks for chiming in Toady. It's good to hear they're changing the song, just surprising that they did all this in the first place.
As for the other posters who quoted me... Every time something like this comes up when I lurk, I always see a small handful of people go off the deep end and make a big deal out of usually minor things. Of course there's a small percentage of the ~33,000 members posting in those topics. It still creates a stereotype of "some of those guys really hate derivative work". I may be wrong, but that's how I feel about the situation, and I believe that's how some casual surfer from another forum or someone who's targeted by the hate will feel, and I dislike that. It feels like something that drives people away from the game and these forums.
And sorry about this. I hadn't read like 70% of this thread before now (or much at all after my post on the second page) but in a lot of ways you are right, people did go off the deep end for some reason. As one put it, ultimately it's Toady's opinion that matters.
Really it's an unfortunate trend, people have been getting more aggressive towards stuff lately it seems. There's a fair few casual projects "inspired by" DF that ended up receiving a lot of hate from some of our members just because they did this one thing or that. The "OMG DF RIPOFF" joke may be funny on occasion but we must remember it has its roots in reality, people just can't stand to see a game even slightly ripping off DF. And even if people agree it's not a ripoff someone will always chime in and just say how awful it is that they're stealing from Toady.
I mean, maybe they are. Maybe somehow one of these products will manage to siphon forty dollars from the monthly donation pool. That would be pretty bad, but I figure as long as people keep doing what they're doing here then a DF clone isn't going to "kill off" DF. And I really doubt any clone would be able to achieve what really keeps people playing: the intrinsic complexity.
But even with all that it's still surprising that some people reacted the way they did. I don't think Capn acted much out of line here (he is part of the "team" I guess), but then again I haven't seen his posts in that other forum, so I don't really know. It's just the small pool of people who will, time and time again, rage at anything deriving or imitating any part of DF, even when the general consensus is that it's not, really.
Honestly, I think in the end we should leave it up to Tarn. He's the man.
(Oh, and speaking of which:
this work does not fall under "derivative", since it was not based on another source but rather copied from it directly)