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If you give something away, without requiring people to at least click "I Accept" to a some sort of terms of service/EULA/user agreement, and in particular if you are not expecting remuneration in exchange (and in fact are legally bound to NOT receive remuneration) then what you just did is "publish open-source" intellectual property.

I am not a lawyer. But, I did get briefed by a lawyer about the basics of how this stuff works, because I write a blog about a subject where you need to reference other people's work a lot, and I wanted to make sure I was staying within the law. And, at least in the US, this is not correct. If I post something on the internet, even if I don't put an EULA or a copyright symbol or anything, it's not public domain and it's not "open source". Other people can make "fair use" of it, but the bounds of what constitutes fair use are pretty vague. Aside from a few cases that don't apply here (e.g., reviews, scholarly work), the new work needs to be, among other things, significantly different then the original. Just changing a few numbers is probably not sufficient - same reason I can't take Harry Potter, do a find-replace "Harry Potter" for "Larry Rotter", and publish it as my own - but it would be up to a judge to decide.

However, the law doesn't really matter very much here, because I think it's safe to say that ShadowDragon and Neceros are not interested in spending tens of thousands of dollars fighting this out, so it's never going to end up in a court. This is Paradox's playbox, and it's their call whether this counts as ripping off or not. I'm going to report the OP to make sure a mod sees the post, and presumably they'll be along in good time.
 
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I am not making a general ruling here, but in this particular case I do not see any ill intent.
The guy made substantive changes (not in the syntax but in the results), and gave credit where credit is due.
 
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