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Regardless of what current licenses dictate, should someone be able to port someone else's code to make a profit? Seems pretty shady to rewrite someone's code just to get around a license. Maybe this is where patents come into play.

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Depends on the kind of rewrite. Automatic translation - that's effectively the same code. Written from scratch - that should definitely be allowed. Otherwise Linux would have to be licensed the same as previous Unixes (it's similar enough, isn't it?), Microsoft would have rights to ReactOS, we'd have only one owner of copyrights to all shells, and one to all DNS servers, etc.

What Monit does is a defined interface, anyone should be able to implement from scratch something that does exactly the same thing.

> Maybe this is where patents come into play.

No, it's a copyright issue. Patents have nothing to do with it.

Unless any method or procedure (parsing of natural language configuration files or something) is patented.

Even if that were the case, it's still beyond the scope of the allegations that can be made in a DMCA takedown notice. If they were asserting any patent rights, that would have to be through a regular cease & desist letter. It is possible though unlikely that patents could come into play here, but they clearly haven't yet.

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