Comment by brikym
4 months ago
Yes - I open sourced a web game which was promptly ripped off and plastered with banner ads. The copycat impersonated me on social media claiming to be the developer. I promptly made the repo private and made many improvements after that point in time so the damage wasn't too bad. But the copycat got a better Google ranking which focused people. There are also a lot of link-farm sites where web games are proxied and embedded with links to other games. The embedding problems went away once I used Cloudflare. This confused a lot of fans as they'd find the awful ad-ridden copycat site. So my advice to anyone with a side project which isn't a library is to keep it private and behind a CDN.
This is a concern for many developers, but I haven't heard of it actually happening when the software isn't crazy famous. Sorry to hear this. Wonder if it's rotten luck or actually a common problem :/
A middle way might be to do like some people and use a license that allows only viewing the code for some months/years and then allows all the normal software freedoms after that time. In the meantime, you get to work on it and keep yourself ahead of any copies that would need to work off of old versions, but if you get hit by a bus or for other reasons abandon it, it's automatically open sourced. I kinda like that mechanism because there's so much abandonware where it would have been really cool to have this. Though, if it's a serious concern that someone copies it like this, it might be a lot of pressure unless the source-available time is very long