I got this in my email:

"I see you're using the 7dana theme. And I also noticed you removed the copyright from the bottom, which is a violation of the license. I suggest you either put it back, use another theme or suffer the consequences. If I don't hear back from you in a few days I'll believe you completely disregard any warnings and take measures."


The site that he refers to is: http://www.behindzioncurtain.com


I replied with this:

"I am using a compilation of several different pieces. Some that I
found on the internet, some that I designed myself, and some that I
paid my design staff to make.

The site that I am using is not using your theme. The current them is
a unique design. No one else on the internet has these design.
There may be similar designs, but not the same as this.

I see no need to give anyone else credit for this design, because it
is my Flash banner, it is my custome navigation, it is my custom
background, all of the CSS has been changed to fit my needs (colors,
links, etc), and all of the credit for anything that I didn't make is
given to the XOOPS community via the link at the bottom of the site."





I have spent a lot of time on this theme and I see no reason to give any credit to anyone but the http://www.xoops.org community as a whole.

I have looked up the 7dana theme that is similar to my theme. Although there appears to be some inspiration from the 7dana theme, the two themes are not the same in my opinion.

1. The background is different.
2. The color scheme is different (even though similar shades of color, they are different colors)
3. The navigation is entirely different.
4. the supportive images are different (like the navigation seperators, etc)


I have paid hard earned money to have this no-profit site designed uniquely. I give credit where credit is due.
But is there any reason to give 7dana full credit for this theme that I paid for and helped design?

If you have copied any of code out of his theme's stylesheet etc. then you are probably obliged to leave a credit to him in the code, even if you later modified it.

However, you are not obliged to leave a visible credit on the face of your website.

Thank you for the advice!

I had my programmer look through the code, and see if there were anything that related to this guys CSS, and he said that it doesn't look much different from other XOOPS CSS. There was a Navigation at the top that was similar, but my programmer took that out, so that the top menu is gone.

I have went out of my way to make this a custom theme, and I don't think that this site is in violation of copyright laws.


Again, thanks for the reply. Take care.

I'm using a 7dana theme and TBH your source looks a lot like the one I'm using

eg

on your site


on my site



On your site


and on my site




Now I'm not saying you intentionally took his theme, but I think somewhere along the line it originated from 7Dana.

You may be right. When I got it, the theme had been hacked up a lot and was not anywhere close to the original.

Then after I got it, I paid to have it modified, and worked on it a lot myself.

I just can't justify giving this guy a link, when the theme that he made, was a hack of someone elses theme, that was a hack of someone elses them, that was a hack etc etc.. Surely the original XOOPS theme had influence on his them, etc..

So Im not going to list credits for 4000 people, just because somehow or another they influenced my website theme.

I gave a link to the XOOPS community, and if someone is interested in learning more, they can go to Xoops.org from my website and see how the XOOPS CMS that I use has evolved.

Thats my take on it anyway. I simply don't want to make room for 4000 links on my home page to pay homage to every single person involved with xoops. The one link should suffice.

To be fair to this guy, I will do as the second poster suggested, and I will put a reference to 7dana in the code. I just cant justify giving this guy a frontend link.
I do appreciate his influence on this theme, but this theme is far different than what he made originally.

7dana themes (in this case 7dana-soft) includes a clear license.txt file within the themes:
Quote:

PLease take notice of point 3 and 4. I'd say this should tell you enough.

That is no big deal, after what I have gone through to compile this website, I have practically written the entire thing anyway. I will just remake this, without using this guys stuff.

I started out not knowing that this guy had any influence on this theme what so ever. But now that I see there are a few characters of his code in it, I will just throw together a theme that is similar, and reupload it.


My goodness! :-0

I've dealt with Goran from 7dana personally, and from my experience a letter such as the one posted here seems a little out of character. Althought some of the id's you're using are signature 7dana, I just can't imagine the first e-mail contact you getting being so abrupt. Can I ask you if the e-mail was signed by Goran himself? In any case you may just wish to alter the class and/or id tag names in your theme.html and CSS so that there is no reference to 7dana code.

The email that I got was from a gmail account, if that helps? The email had "nomad" and some digits.
But it wasn't signed.

I was a little taken back by how abrupt the emailing was too. That was first contact, and he totally blasted me.

Anyway, in about 10 minutes, I have reconstructed a theme using my own graphics and CSS, just basing it off the default theme. I'm close to making this look how it looked before with very little effort.

No big deal. I was just a little set back by the rudeness of this guy.