Seems to me this is proof that you can lose an idea by telling someone about it. I hear a lot here that you shouldn't worry about telling people your ideas because ideas are worthless. I've never agreed with that.

Here we have someone who had a really great idea, did part of the work, and then told people about it. Then he sat on it and didn't release. Someone else came along, loved the idea, and wrote it from scratch in a month.

Does the original author care? Probably not. He's probably happy to see it be used. But if it had been a money-making idea, he'd be a lot less happy.

Software development is a very fast-moving field, and if you sit on your ideas at all, someone will do them instead. That's worth remembering.