I've been told that there is some kind of dispute where I got the piston mod from, so I just wanted to tell my side of the story:

The initial idea and source code was submitted to me by Hippoplatimus. However, when I started working on the pistons I got a number of emails from a guy called DiEvAl, where he explained how he created pistons in his ManufactoidCraft mod.

The key concept that I used from his suggestion was to use so-called "tile entities" instead of game entities to keep track of the moving parts. DiEvAl sent me some example snippets that got me on track. He later accepted the license agreement our lawyer has asked me to send to people who wants to contribute code, and sent me full source files.

In both cases, I looked at the submitted code, but the only thing I remember copying was the placement facing code in Hippo's mod (because it was easy to use without modifications).

What I'm trying to say is that I intend to contribute the submission to both authors.

Preemptively I want to answer the question why I rewrote the code myself: It wasn't because of the "not invented here syndrome," but because 1) the code is still obfuscated in the Minecraft JAR, so everything has different names in the submissions, and 2) I implemented the tile entity solution without having all of DiEvAl's code, so I simply wasn't able to copy the code.

TL;DR: Internet debates are for teh loes.