Our mod has been stolen

[Igiss]

One of the newly found Russian servers with a homepage located at http://flserver.ru has attracted my attention recently. They started by using Discovery 4.84 on their server, but in less than a month made their own mod named "Alliance". The mod had the same size as Discovery 4.84, and I downloaded it to see what they got.

After unpacking the mod and comparing it with Discovery 4.84 by an utility called CSDiff, I found that out of ~1420 files that Discovery mod contains:
- 18 new files added by creators of Alliance;
- 9 files were deleted;
- 44 files were modified;
- 1370 files were not changed.
96% of the mod's files were not modified in any way. To make things worse, Alliance included a completely rewritten readme file (in Russian) that listed 3 "authors" of the mod (administrators of http://flserver.ru). Me and everyone who contributed their code and models for Discovery were not included into the document. Original readme.txt for Discovery was deleted.

The mod includes all ship models that Discovery included. Unlike me, Alliance authors did not ask permission for any of the 3rd party models. Also, they leaved all models created specially for Discovery by our community members, also without asking anyone's permission. This is, for example, what their map looks like:



Compare with original: http://discoverygc.com/files/discoverymap.gif

I have started a thread on their forum trying to persuade them to remove the content they stole from Discovery. They did not agree, and admins have initiated a flame war against me and Treewyrm who wrote there too. We were insulted, called "overseas jews", and blamed for unwillingness to co-operate.

Won't encourage you to go there and write anything else, since the site is Russian-only, and will ask not to attempt to do anything illegit against their site or server (I know that some of you might think that revenge might be a proper way to act, but I won't agree). However, watch out. If they will attempt to promote their website on any international resources like Mod DB, Fileplanet or others, we will need to take appropriate action.