I had a simalar problem with lavaburst.
He had asked me to post a review about his work and I wasn't going to because I felt it was better to say nothing at all at the time. Now seeing I am not the only one who has had a simalar problem with him I felt maybe I should post it.
I employed Lavaburst to dev. private code for me. He even asked me how I wanted to lic. it. He said are you going to release it as GPL i said No not at this time I want to take the time and perfect it. After all it was our first time working together and the first module we were going to release. He then took it upon himself to change the name of it and release it for free. I called Lavaburst on it and he took the code down, and agreed to make it up to me by dev. another concept of mine for me called xCredits. I felt better about the relationship we were trying to work on but I did not totally trust him.
Lavaburst sent me a non working final module for xcredits and I told him about it. He then said he would take a look at it for me and I never heard anything else from him until a few days later to see he had done it to me again. Took my xCredits module, fixed it, renamed it, changed bits of the code, and released it as Credits.
Then went on to bash me and my practices of how I run my website like saying "for some reason you have to register at
http://moh.xoaclan.com." The final straw was for him to remove my credits for the credits module. Take a look at the code, first there is a lot of code that is not needed in there and looks like he used another module as a base. That kind of supports that other guys claim. Second, the original differences between xCredits and Credits, xcredits points everything to index.php credits points to main.php, inside the code for Credits it was exactly the same EXCEPT credits got renamed to creds in the code, and I used a smarty template where he used that "movie style"
Now he has added new features but the extra code is still in there today. Any programmer can see it, I am not a programmer but once it was pointed out to me we removed it and the code still worked just fine.
Honestly, I thought XOOPS was a place to create a module, release it to the public, and as a group make it better. All I have gotten out of this was a bad taste, you release something then someone changes a few things on it and instead of working with that person, They changed the name of the module, take off his credits and re-release it? Why would we as a group want 100 different modules that all do tha same thing? This site is to bring us together to work on this not rip other people off out of credits, code, and or money.
Lavaburst you wanted my review, honestly I had 3 other concepts I was going to let you do for me and again pay you to do so. After all this I cant trust you nor would I recommend you as a programmer to anyone. You promised me a sweet module but at the same time I felt ripped off. I paid you in advance for your time and you took your time. I was waiting for you to come back and ask for more cash. I was faithful to this business transaction and I expected the same professionalism out of yourself but you did not return it.
Sorry for taking so long but as a group maybe you needed to know what has happened so the proper credits are given to the proper people. After all that is what xCredits was to be all about. Make it easy for everyone to proudly display the credits for the people and all their hard work, not hide it away on a hidden link at the bottom of the page or put it in a txt file inside the module download. It was set up so you the user could see a module and know where to get it from without searching the code and or the internet all day and night only not to find it.