Last year a developer named Alex Restpero released a Custom Editfield Control for REALbasic. An excellent piece of programming and a very sophisticated and useful control. He received feedback such as ‘Excellent work, just excellent!!! And they said it couldnt be done!’ and ‘Very well done Alex!’. Rightly so - it is an excellent tool.

Fast forward to late last month when I released my REALbasic Starter Kit with a Syntax highlighter module built in. A fellow developer with who I have had no previous contact decided to review the product on a public site, give it a 1 star rating and include the following comments (among others):

‘There is a strong suspicion in the REALbasic community that he is just repacking code that others have given away for free. This suspicion stems in part from the fact that his other product REALbasic Syntax Highlighter Module seems to be a repackaged version of Alex Resrepo's SyntaxHighlightEditField which is free ‘

As a professional developer who makes his living writing software and always behaves in an ethical manner - I had to respond to this.

Firstly I asked Alex Restpero, the author of the software I was supposed to have copied, to look at my code and make a statement as to whether or not I had in fact stolen his code. Alex, very kindly provided this reply to this midguided and insecure individual with the following comment:

‘Markus, I just reviewed the syntax highlighting code, and I can tell you it's definitely not based on mine. Steve's code is keyword-based, while mine is regex-rule based.’

So my point is proven - I did not ‘repackage’ anybody’s code it was written from scratch by me and is sold perfectly legitimately as part of my REALbasic Starter Kit. The problem for me is that this individual’s nasty and ill informed words are still there to continuously annoy me ...

I have emailed the individual twice, with no response, I have called him out in the REALBasic Mailing List, with no response - all I would like is for him to get the review removed and apologise for his ‘misunderstanding’. We can then have a virtual hug and get on with our lives.

If I ever hear from this individual I will update this post, but I don’t hold out much hope, maybe he will prove me wrong, I hope so.

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Tags: Grumble, REALbasic