This is a quote from one of the devs in the NXT forum:
It is not a clone, at least not a clone of the recent code. The code is obfuscated (probably proguard?) and I don't have time to dig further, but seems to be using a lot of third party libraries that we don't use. Uses jetty, and json-simple, but also jackson and mapdb, no H2.
The developer has definitely borrowed ideas from Nxt, but probably not much from the current implementation.
As for the speculations that it may be BCNext himself - not his style, remember the original Nxt code did not use any other libraries (even the jetty dependency was added later by CfB) and was a single file. It is more likely a good java developer who started from the original Nxt 0.4.x code like I did, but then continued his own way into a completely different implementation. But all this may have been intentional, to confuse people - so the conspiracy theories will keep going on.
Either way, gives us a motivation to speed up development.
If you start from an already existing code and modify it, then it is technically a fork/clone and not completely new code, right? Even if you add new features. Dogecoin is based on Litecoin (via Luckycoin) which is based on Bitcoin, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian, and LibreOffice is based on OpenOffice.org. These are all forks/clones but they all add something new to the table.
So is Qora based on NXT (i.e. a fork) or is it completely new code written from scratch?
As someone who owns a small amount of DOGE and LTC, uses LibreOffice, and occasionally boots up Ubuntu, I'm not saying that forking/cloning is a bad thing. But I'm just curious. It seems that coins with completely new code written from the ground up such as NXT is a very rare thing in the altcoin world.