As a designer, I find it somewhat perplexing that people here demand that code be directly copied for something like this be wrong. Design is more abstract than code, yes, but it's just as fundamental a part of the resulting product.
Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning. Because it is not user facing, identically copied code--when the design has been changed--has no such effects. Why do so many people believe that only copying code should be considered wrong when design has the potential to be more damaging? To me, they are both equally wrong.
Great artists steal. Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just please don't copy my implementation or designs. I need those things to be sacred so I can craft experiences that are not diluted by external factors.
I'm wondering how is this very different from MS Office vs. LibreOffice...
Granted, latest incarnations of MS's products are a bit different with the (crappy) ribbon and all, but LO is quite similar to previous versions of Office.
And I'm talking both about UI, design and functionality. Think Excel/Calc functions, for example.
If you copied the articles, yes. If you copied the design using none of their assets or code, no. Copying it definitely is, stealing it definitely isn't (at least not in the legal sense, the moral sense is debatable.)
You should have confidence that you will win because you can implement it better, understand the need better, can craft better solutions faster, and have better content on your network. If those things aren't true and all you had was an idea, unfortunately this was bound to happen.
Ideas alone are not defensible, practically or even legally. Successful implementations thereof can be however.
No, he is correct and you are wrong. "Original", as used here, is a term of art that means "not infringing anyone's copyright". Like it or not, "look and feel" has not been established to be copyrightable. Just ask Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros...
You've deliberately recreated someone's work with the intention of offering a competing product. Legalities aside, it's pretty damn rude. Yes, it's a rip-off. (I don't use that phrase lightly and I'm usually all for remixing, which this isn't.)
How is this a ripoff? I didn't follow the story but from what I see in the GH page, he's making an alternative to your currently closed-source solution.
That is exactly what he did. Just because it's closed source doesn't mean it's fair to make an identical copy (in the interface and interaction design sense) that is free.
I'm not very well-versed in this type of stuff but I want to ask you an honest question: Is creating an open-source alternative to a closed-source software considered theft?
In terms of design, yes. He didn't just make something that performs the same function. He took Dustin's ideas and visual design so directly that it might even legally count as copyright infringement. Since dcurtis's work is not licensed for this use, making a copy might not be legal. And since he wanted to keep it closed for a while, lifting all his hard work into your own project is not cool.
> Is creating an open-source alternative to a closed-source software considered theft?
No, never, as long as the open-source alternative doesn't actually copy any copyrightable material from the original (such as images or other data). And I don't see any signs of that here.
On the contrary, creating an open-source alternative to closed-source software is considered awesome.
"theft" is so incorrect that you damage the credibility of your argument by using the term.
You have a social/emotional complaint: someone took your good idea (and kudos to you: it's a great idea!), and duplicated it. But it's recognized (and documented here) that you were the progenitor of the idea, and if you eventually open source the original, I can't see how this will "hurt" you. People have an innate sense of fairness, and duplicating ideas like this goes against it in a small way.
But it's not theft (or even copyright infringement), and by overreacting you are going to alienate people who would otherwise be sympathetic.
I'm really not condoning the infringement here or trying to act as Captain Hindsight. But having shown something brilliant but closed to a community of interested and talented people, did you not partially expect this?
dcurtis is a professional designer. The amount of work that went into the design of the app was probably huge. If he's making his living as a designer, ripping off his design against his wishes could actually damage his business.
That's a faulty conclusion. Being a professional designer has no bearing on how much time you spend designing something.
In fact, you could assume the opposite: that, because he is a professional designer, it took him less time to design the app than it would've taken a "layman". (I'm not forgetting about the perfectionism of many designers, mind you)
It has incredible bearing. Let's presume it took him 1 hour to design the site. (It surely took dozens or hundreds, including modifications and improvements, but play along.) That 1 hour isn't just 1 hour. It's 1 hour, plus the 5 or 10 or 15 years he has spent living and breathing design, refining his abilities and sharpening his understanding of the craft. He can do a singular design faster than a "layman" because he has spent a significantly greater amount of time on Design in general.
Umm, yeah. It still took one hour of his time, regardless of how much experience he has. If someone rips of this idea, and he loses out, he has lost one hour of his time; not ten years.
Sure, Dustin doesn't have the the trademarks for svbtle registered (yet), but completely ripping off someone else's work or defending the action is neither honorable nor moral.
You can't go around putting the Coke label on different fizzy beverages.
Svbtle is obviously popular for its brand. You are stealing its brand and using it for unintended purposes. The only value in what you've created is that it looks like Dustin's work.
Ripping that off wholesale diminishes the value of something Dustin work(ed/s) very hard to create and curate. Thousands of decisions went into that design. The design is a mark of quality.
So a startup takes a few lines of code from 37 Signals, modifies it for their layout and the web world is up in arms, but this guy takes Dustin's exact design and gives it away and it's not theft?
Maybe if he just took the idea, with the ideas/published and simplified writing screen, he may have a case, but this is clearly stealing the design.
That hotlinking came up only later in the discussion. It definitely started with some of their pages having the same structure as some 37signal pages to great dismay of the community.
(1) Apparently many people, including you, are up in arms about this too.
(2) It's pretty confirmed that a lot of our intuitions regarding "theft" require us to see "profit" as a component -- and therefore we are much less likely to see theft in a general design that has been open-sourced. Maybe the clearest way to see this is BSD's libedit, which replicates the GNU Readline library so that you can use it without selling your soul to Stallman. It's an idea rip-off, but it serves a very important charitable function. Startups trying to push product just seem more skeevy.
(3) It is also harder to see something as "theft" if it seems too simple. Nate said, "I whipped open terminal, typed in rails new obtvse, and a few hours later I'm here." That's pretty lightweight, if you're creating a fresh copy from an idea someone gave you.
Edit: (4) Also it's often harder to consider something theft when you cite your sources and say, "okay, this idea comes straight from X, who is awesome -- all credit to them please."
1. Not at all up in arms, just this this is a little hypocritical of the HN community.
2. I disagree, he's directly taken the fruits of someone elses' labour and given them away without permission. Copying the functionality and idea, I'm fine with, but he didn't "remake" the design like he did the functionality, he just remade the scripting aspect of it. The benefits you mention are functional benefits, and these could have been brought to the public without the near pixel perfect design.
3. I somewhat agree, however I could remake the design of any website without copying and pasting in a short time. It would take a short time because all the time that was spent designing it has been done by someone else.
4. Maybe slightly, but he took what someone else had produced without permission, at best this is a slightly scummy thing to do. He tweeted Dustin to let him know that he had done it, he could have just as easily asked. If Dustin had refused then he'd be free to make something which fulfils the same function, but isn't a clone.
For the record, I'm not sure exactly where I stand regarding IP, but I'm not talking from a legal perspective, just an ethical one, and I don't think this is ethical nor HN's praise of it.
I live in China, a country mocked for its cloning. If the Chinese had hand written the GroupOn site, for example, rather than copy/pasting it, most people who still think it's low. It seems to me more that people think that a) Dustin is a bit of a dick and b) open sourcing something means you can do whatever you like because it's for the good of humanity.
If he's using your code, you have something to say, otherwise, not really, thankfully. I don't want to live in a world where SCO wins, or Apple puts the kibosh on Microsoft for creating an interface with icons and windows.
I think you should calm down, take a deep breath, accept the compliment, and see how you can work together. It sounds like he'd be happy to help you make it 'ready' faster.
That's not true. Making a "new" version of something that is intentionally a copy of something else is copyright infringement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit Only clean-room reverse engineering is good enough to avoid copyright claims in the US.
I'm not saying that nwienert is necessarily right or wrong, but it's strange that this post received such a strong reaction compared to the Font Awesome post.
Bootstrap is intended for use by whoever wants it. Font Awesome was presented as a tweak, an improvement. Svbtle is intended for a small audience, and Obtvse is a straight rip-off
Can you show us some references to this law?
In Europe you can apply for design patents. Afaik doing so costs a four digit sum in EUR plus the patent lawyer that writes the legalese for you.
However, to get such a patent the design must clearly be novel. Really, really novel. My uncle happens to be a patent lawyer a.d. who fought a lot of cases about product design for a big telco in the European patents court in his time. Knowing a few of his cases, I strongly doubt dcurtis design would be eligible for a design patent in Europe.
The blog itself (it's functionality) would fail an attempt to patented for similar reasons.
Apart from that, yes there is copyright everywhere but where this starts in cases like the one at hand is a gray area at best.
I'm not a lawyer, but it appears to be covered in the Berne Convention [1] as "works of applied art". The copied design we saw this morning was probably "substantially similar" [2] to the original. Apparently designs are copyrighted in the US as well, in contrast to what I thought [3].
I guess my point was that all that doesn't matter if the original design doesn't exhibit enough originality (I used the term 'novel').
To give an example: if I have an A4 page with left aligned text, that looks very similar to any other A4 page with left aligned text that happens to use the same font size and line height.
In the case at hand, the design wasn't even dcurtis', he presumably took it from http://drawar.com/
Or maybe not?
With a design so simple, similarity by coincidence can't be ruled out.
I wouldn't be surprised if another dozen websites existed that exhibited a /very/ similar design.
there is something called "ethics" and "politeness". when you choose companions and collaborators, these are quite important values, obviously, the guy haven't heard of these words and obviously working with a person like that is not fun, you will then feel ashamed when he does something like this as a part of your team.
Something doesn't have to be illegal to be morally reprehensible. It's perfectly alright to think that copying a design should be legal and to still believe that it is morally wrong.
I'm not sure where the idea comes from that when someone displays displeasure with something, they want it to be illegal. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's good.Just because it's not good doesn't mean it should be illegal.
I like Dustin's design better, but DAMN.. he clearly borrowed from there :) I don't see a problem here, and I would feel flattered if I were Dustin (or Paul Scrivens).
Since when are drafts a revolutionary blogging concept that dcurtis has a monopoly on? And Obtvse did not copy the community building via invites. In fact that was the whole point.
No, we were discussing whether Obtvse is evil. You said that although you did not disagree that Dustin copied drawar.com's design, the important contribution of Dustin is the drafts & closed community, and by implication that the evil act of Obtvse was to copy (a subset of) these concepts from Dustin. That is what I was contesting.
> How different would you say his parody of your site is than your site is of http://drawar.com/ ?
I said I don't see how Svbtle is a copy of drawar.com:
> I don't see it; the whole workflow - draft to publish columns and such - is the same at drawar, or?
So I do not think that Svbtle is a rip-off of drawar.com.
Now if there's anything unique about Svbtle compared to the blogging systems I've personally used, its the draft thing (as explained in the Svbtle article we all read here on HN a few hours before this one).
My tumblr has drafts; but its not this trello-like list organising thing. As Dustin says, it helps make stories happen and posts get written.
Dustin, I still stand by the original work. Notice I've changed three things on the site: a slightly grey header, non-bordered links, and a square logo.
Also it was FAR from a pixel-for-pixel exact duplication. Spacing around the site is still different, as is the font and font sizing.
I think you should realize you overreacted a bit. It was simply an experiment and a way to give back to the community.
And you should realize that you took Dustin's idea, whereas he probably thought about it for a long time, and you in 5mn you make a snapshot, modify few colors, change the font and declare it's your "personnal design" now. What a shame. And I'm not a Dustin's fan, few hours ago when I read his disclaimer for svbtle saying that it was for genius people blah blah blah. I told myself "what a d*", but I also thought that the design of his site is brillant.
> Please take this site down and delete the Github repository. The work isn't yours.
Any semi-competent programmer can reproduce it within a day or two(the OP did it in a shorter span of time). That won't help, and you aren't entitled to what you think you are.
And the work is totally his. The design was too similar, but still, its his work. He didn't steal your css or images, and though you might feel rough about it, it doesn't make it theft as you are putting it again and again.
> Just wait until Svbtle is finished and open to the public. The reason it's closed is really simple: it's not ready yet.
Great for people who want to blog on Svbtle. If I don't and I like the idea, I am going to implement it and use it. I am glad we don't live in a world where you or anyone else can stop me from doing it.
The hard part was coming up with the original concept and design - kudos to you for the great work. Reproducing it is easy, and I don't think you have any right to stop me from doing it.
As another commenter pointed out, we don't actually want a world where Apple says MS stole its windows.
There's actually quite an open market for imitations of great art. They're not nearly as valuable as the originals, though, because painters like van Gogh created astonishing works of art and part of the value is being able to gaze upon original proof of astonishing human achievement.
I would never repaint van Gogh, because I'd rather paint my own things. On the other hand, if I were to want a Thomas Kincade painting (for some ghastly reason), I'd definitely buy the cheapest reproduction I could find, because the original painting just wasn't that valuable to begin with.
> I would never repaint van Gogh, because I'd rather paint my own things.
If I were a painter, I would paint me the hell out of some van Gogh. In every skill I've practiced seeing what the masters do, reproducing it (especially figuring out _why_ they did it that way) has been a very useful learning technique.
More to the point of your post, and this story: Would I sell my van Gogh copies? Probably not. Not because I think there's something terribly wrong about it. Mostly because they'd still be inferior to the original.
I would certainly give them away to friends who wanted to hang it in their den or library, though.
I think this is a bad comparison. Yep, if I repaint Starry Night, I will not be Van Gogh; but the case here is different. dcurtis' idea was public influencing. The idea was a blogging paradigm which would effect the writing approaches of the people. It was a great idea, but it's different from a personnal artwork. It has a broader domain than it. I think the society is allowed to use the idea. I agree, perhaps obtvse creator could do a little innovation and use a little different CSS and HTML design.
If you paint Starry Night from scratch and hang it on the wall at a strip club, that would be a parody, and would constitute transformation of the original.
... and that is fine as long you let people know that it not an original van Gogh.
Unfortunately, you picked a bad example: a painting is a finite resource -- there is only one physical painting painted by the original artist. A painting cannot be "copied" with the same veracity as software can be (bitwise, which in the case of software becomes piracy) and any attempt to pass a "copy" of a painting as an original is forgery.
Classifying any work (art/software) as a rip-off requires defining the very fine line between fair-use and unfair forgery. When it comes to artistic endeavors (as in "design"), you'll have more luck defining the position and velocity of an electron around a nucleus than delineating that fair/unfair boundary.
It honestly perplexes me how you can in the same breath admit that someone has done hard work and imply that you owe them nothing for using it.
I realize this is not the mainstream HN view. Accepted wisdom says if you can copy something, than you may copy it. But I just don't get it. If you value someone's work, I think you owe them some form of compensation.
There's a line I read on 1001 Rules For My Unborn Son, "If a street performer makes you stop walking, you owe him a buck." I tend to agree with this, both literally and metaphorically.
I agree that good ideas shouldn't be trapped or left to wither in isolation when they could benefit society at large. I just think this has to be tempered with some form of compensation to the person who introduced the idea.
But I'm open to being convinced otherwise if anyone has a good argument to the contrary.
> It honestly perplexes me how you can in the same breath admit that someone has done hard work and imply that you owe them nothing for using it.
I am quoting this example for the second time. MS made Office common place. It doesn't mean OpenOffice.org owed MS anything, other than "hey neat". As long as it's not infringement recognized by law, no body owes anyone anything.
> if you can copy something, than you may copy it.
"can copy" is hard, may be a little less hard than the first implementation, but it's still hard work. You don't get exclusivity by getting there first. In the cases in which you do get it viz. software patents, it creates more problems than it solves. So yes, I am pretty much in line with "if you can copy it, you may".
> If you value someone's work, I think you owe them some form of compensation.
It's entirely possible to value someone's work, but not agree with his exclusivity requirements.
> I agree that good ideas shouldn't be trapped or left to wither in isolation when they could benefit society at large. I just think this has to be tempered with some form of compensation to the person who introduced the idea.
And I think "I was here first so you all are prosecuting me by not going somewhere else and trying to get here" is a prefect way to let good ideas wither and die. More importantly, this sense of exclusivity and entitlement is misplaced.
It's not being first that I think conveys some right to recompense but being original.
If something is inevitable or trivial (slide to unlock, one-click checkout), I don't think there should be any protection at all.
But the more original something is, the more the creator has actually added to society by creating it. And yes, copying it can add to society as well by making it universal, but I think some kind of monetary incentive is a great way to get people to work on original ideas.
Would Apple be so creative if they weren't so profitable? Isn't it their profitability which gives them the ability to spend time and money on R&D? If you take away the profit, don't you take away the opportunity to do R&D?
I think this is why patents were introduced in the first place. I don't think patents work for software, but I think the idea is the same. For the greatest good for society, we want lots and lots of universally applied creative ideas. But there's a trade-off between encouraging new ideas and encouraging mass distribution of ideas. "IP" laws encourage new ideas but discourage sharing. "Piracy" encourages sharing but discourages new ideas.
I just think that there needs to be a balance, and that "thanks for doing the hard work, I'll take it from here" isn't it.
EDIT: I would appreciate an explanation of why people feel I am not contributing.
> Would Apple be so creative if they weren't so profitable? Isn't it their profitability which gives them the ability to spend time and money on R&D? If you take away the profit, don't you take away the opportunity to do R&D?
If Apple's profit equates to Android not doing what they are doing, Apple going bankrupt will be a fair trade in my book. If Apple comes up with something original, which Android re-implements, it doesn't owe Apple anything, even if it affects Apple's profits. Apple working on original things and being in business is good, but not so much that others' ability to re-implement things be taken away.
I see what you're saying. But Android doesn't copy Apple nearly as thoroughly as other examples of copying.
Android has different hardware, a different OS, a different programming language for development, etc.
At the most precise level, copying music creates and absolutely perfect copy. There is literally no difference between the original file and the new one.
Would it be fair for someone to make an exact copy of an iPhone, running an exact copy of iOS and then distribute it?
I think the precision of the copy has a great deal to do with whether it's OK or not, which I think is what Dustin was getting at when he said it's OK to steal his ideas but not his implementation.
Maybe he doesn't get to draw the line wherever he likes, but it seems there ought to be a line somewhere.
Why was it announced if it isn't ready yet? Reminds me of the way lifepath.me was treated. Not sure what the pre-announcing accomplishes if your goal is to ship things people can use.
on your edit: pixel-for-pixel? Are you kidding? That would be hard to do in an html document even if it was your goal.
Not only that, but I saw the original, and it wasn't.
You have inverted the moral terrain, and you are now going to have to defend your own credibility / honesty when you are leveling those same accusations at someone else.
It's hardly the most complex of designs; looking at this and comparing it to yours, he inherits the basic layout (which isn't really revolutionary) but doesn't have the complexity and flashiness - which seems to me the critical portion of the design.
As to writing it.. you made a fairly big splashy announcement about this great new concept in blogging, and then made it invitation only. That's guaranteed to get push back from the community, especially one that considers ideas only good for execution!
It seems fairly simple to implement - you might claim some moral ownership of the concept, but that probably won't hold up well, either, in this community.
This is community that lives on the maxim of "release early and iterate", we're not always looking for a slick finished product. So now you have competition; may the best product win!
(It may seem cruel, Dustin, but you do have an attitude - and that seems to have grated on people. So, maybe this gives you an experience of the same feeling. Just saying.)
EDIT: Dustin's edited response is interesting; as a programmer I probably don't set as much store by the elements of design as he (naturally) does - simple things don't represent a creative element, to me in the same way. Which is interesting food for thought.
Hopefully Nate will continue to move his design away from Dustin's
Edit: If you're talking about the changed version this morning, check out the screenshots at the bottom to see what dcurtis was mad about.
Basic layout? Also the color scheme, font hierarchy, whitespace around elements (which is a critical portion of the design), and basically every trick dcurtis used to draw the eye and maintain the mental flow of the app.
I willingly admit that, not being a designer, I may well have miss the subtlety in the basic layout that is important. Is there really that much in the column sizing?
With that said; you are right about font/colors (I hadn't noticed).
I give credit to Nate for taking steps to address those similarities following feedback, and I hope he goes further with that.
> As to writing it.. you made a fairly big splashy announcement about this great new concept in blogging, and then made it invitation only. That's guaranteed to get push back from the community, especially one that considers ideas only good for execution!
I think you've captured the essence of why some HN readers think Dustin had this coming, so to speak. The act of making the system exclusive is abrasive to so many hackers, where information is free to all, and the modifiers of this information are those with the recognizable merit to affect it. Dustin released his project in a Bizarro world version of the open source process, where information is chained and those granted access are selected in private, with no transparency of the criteria.
In fact, I would say Dustin did have it coming. That's what open source tends to do, like it or not. You only have to look back at the most popular proprietary systems of note to see that hackers love to imitate these products, if not downright replace them. Unix? Linux. Microsoft Office? LibreOffice. TiVo? MythTv. Hell, there's even a SimCity imitation called LinCity! The jackals, as Nolan Bushnell called them, are out in force--and if you haven't noticed, that's the way things have been for the last 30 years. It was inevitable that Svbtle would be "liberated". What's actually amazing is that this time it only took ten hours.
Now, if I were Dustin, I would likely be offended that my code had been reverse-engineered so closely. If I presented my code with the attitude that it is better than sliced bread, yeah, I would definitely feel wronged by my design being copied. I can sympathize with that. But I can't sympathize with the bubble in which Svbtle was presented. It came off as pretentious. There's no room for that in this day and age. And I'm not saying that Dustin Curtis deserved to have his design imitated because he was pretentious, oh no. I'm saying that he should not be so surprised that it happened. Curtis's attitude led to an imitation surfacing in such short time. Dustin's attitude affected Nate on an emotional level--and that's what brings out the jackal in open source hackers.
I think what inspired the push back most isn't just that he went for a closed system, but that he went for an elitest sounding system.
I agree with your third paragraph; I sympathise with Dustin's viewpoint (though I don't entirely agree with it). I don't think he deserved the imitation, but his approach pretty much guaranteed it.
But I can't bring myself to criticise Nate either, because, as you say, he followed the typical hacker ethics - which is that if something good isn't accessible, make it so. I like that social structure; it adds competition and forces products to be the very best they can. It avoids the situation where one person can control an idea by virtue of being the first mover.
Nate misfired by being similar to the original design, I for one (and I can understand Dustin feeling differently) can forgive that mistake partly as a "hacked together in a night" job and partly because the design elements (only in my opinion) are not revolutionary. Provided he works to fix that issue (some of which he has done) then I see no problem.
I was thinking about this over coffee... I am sure that a lot of thought and effort went into Svbtle and its design; both thought and coding (no idea how much of a coder Dustin is). It's tempting to see Nate's work as hurried and with less value - but he put his skill as a coder into cloning it in a night, and he seems to want to pursue the idea further. Many of the best projects in the world started as hacked up examples, clones or tests. And, again, I am a sucker for "released early, accepting patches" :)
Which is why, morally, I'm with Nate - because his whole approach seems "nicer" than Dustin's. If this platform goes the distance, who would I want to see at the helm? Perhaps the wrong measure, but I'm only human :)
> As a designer, I find it somewhat perplexing that people here demand that code be directly copied for something like this be wrong. Design is more abstract than code, yes, but it's just as fundamental a part of the resulting product.
Design is a fundamental part of the product - no body is contesting it. Personally I am taking exception to your exclusivity expectations. I have given it a lot of thought, and I believe the current optimum is he can rip off your design and only thing you can do about it is feel outraged. The alternative is scary - if this sort of exclusivity requirements are enforced, Apple would shutdown MS over supposedly copying windows and Android over copying "swipe to unlock".
> Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning.
That's how free market works.
> Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just don't copy my implementation or designs.
I can choose to play nice, or I can rip you off wholesale. As long as I am within the realms of law, it's fair game. You might not like it, but it's better than the alternatives where you can dictate what I can and can not do just because you did something first.
Takes a lot to admit this, especially publicly. Hopefully if I find myself in a similar situation, I'll do the same thing, and in less than an hour after my initial reaction.
If HN had Kudos buttons, I'd hover my mouse over yours for a few seconds.
I honestly can't remember the last time a fellow HN user put together an unfinished project, wrote a blog post demonstrating the ideas behind the project, and then had his work so shamelessly ripped off on the very day it was created!
To see the HN community defending this is really sad.
Dustin himself had asked people not to copy his work and that he was releasing it publicly:
> Just please don't copy my implementation or designs. I need those things to be sacred so I can craft experiences that are not diluted by external factors.
I don't understand how reusing/copying something finely done reduce its sacredness/sanctity.
I could be wrong, but I suspect the legitimacy or illegitimacy of copying design is a red herring here.
Perhaps svbtle's invite-only status made people feel like outsiders, perhaps something you've done in the past rubbed someone the wrong way - either way, I suspect the personal dislike comes first and the justification for the action comes second. If the design of a much-beloved figure here was stolen, I suspect the reaction and the arguments in the thread would be very different.
Stanley Fish wrote an interesting opinion piece recently about this impulse, applied to politics:
You say "In fact, it goes against the very ethos of Hacker News.", do you think your action aligns with the "ethos of Hacker News"?
Do you think it's okay to rip-off something just because you think it shouldn't be invite only?
Never said the motivation was because it was invite-only, I just wanted something similar so I created it. I've modified it somewhat, is it still a "rip-off"? Let me know how much more I should modify it before it isn't a "rip-off".
If you look at both versions it should be clear what I mean with rip-off. I don't care if you implement the "ideas panel" or whatever yourself.
But if I you take the design and make your version look the same, then it's a rip-off. Yes, you modified it. But please put both versions next to each other and tell me they don't look like each other. As long as you don't have an original design it's a rip-off for me.
> There is a difference between taking an idea and a design.
When the idea is the design (as is the case with visitor.js), no there is not. In both cases, it's taking and reimplementing wholesale (but from scratch) the closed product into an open-source one.
Not to pass any judgment on this issue either way, but is there any way in which this situation is not almost identical to the visitor.js/session.js situation a few months back?
Also not passing judgment, but here's a comment from that thread that might be relevant here:
"I'm super impressed you turned this out so quickly. I think that really sums up the spirit in the HN community...
When you look at something that seems overpriced (or wrongly-priced) and you say "hey, I bet I could do this""
If we're "just sayin'" there's another quote from the same thread:
> But the fact is - they created something and shared it here. If you think you can do a better job at it - fine, but why haven't you done it before, or at the very least named it differently. I don't mean to exaggerate, but it just doesn't feel ethical to me.
"It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."
I'm fascinated by the fact that this topic is so close to Copyright/RIAA/MPAA, but the discussion is wildly different.
It is hard to tell if all the people who jump to the defense of Curtis are also defenders of copyright for music and films, but judging from the comment distribution I think at some people here have to be hypocrites.
For this to be similar, you'd have to make a distinction between someone copying music bit by bit and distributing the original file, vs someone making a COVER recording of a famous song (no matter how accurate), and distributing that for free.
No matter how much RIAA and MPAA would like to change it, recording covers for existing music, I believe, is fully supported culturally and legally.
> recording covers for existing music, I believe, is fully supported culturally and legally.
Yes, so long as the correct licences are paid. If it's a live cover the venue will be paying licence fees and if it's a recorded cover the band will need licence as soon as they start distributing it.
As much as I would love to have access to svbtle I think this ia very good clone which goes too far. Perhaps it would have been a bit more acceptable to take inspiration from the great drafting/publishing pattern which is what makes Svbtle great in my eyes, without mostly copying the UI. I understand you were probably just trying to make a great tool available to the community (Thanks!) but I think you're maybe giving off a false and malicious intent
Thank you for the feedback. Perhaps I did go too far. I will reduce the visual similarities and push up a less similar version. It really only took a few minutes to reproduce.
There's a name for this: Cargo Cult - copying behaviour without understanding why it exists in the first place. It's a part of human nature, even apes do it (they copy your very moves if they like you). Since we still do it, I suspect it has benefitted us during our previous evolution, and perhaps it still makes sense sometimes.
The point is, I'm not trying to build a brand, make money off this, or prove anything whatsoever. It was really just an experiment... to see how quickly I could do it and to see how people would react (and to make some good open source software).
Notice the name, "obtuse".. But I am glad I got this response, it's been both entertaining and enlightening!
As mentioned in another comment, I really dig what you did. You put it on GH so everybody can build customizations upon it. That's how new things are born. Perhaps it will become a barebone blog template just because it received this whole attention. If Dustin's elite writer concept is good, it will succeed no matter what. Ideas are everywhere, execution is everything.
Imitating something that already exists is nowhere near as difficult as creating something truly unique. To create some that's never existed before requires different skills. If know the exact storyboard, functionality, and design should work, then you don't even have to stop and think about anything while implementing it. You don't even need any trial error because someone else did that work already.
Carbon copying for vanity just doesn't my respect.
How is it a ripoff to see something and build your own version? It's not like he copied your codebase or logos or anything else. Is a Mercedes E-Series a rip-off of a BMW 5-series?
I guess thats why many of you US guys like patents and shit so much. It just makes no effing sense.
He created everything from scratch as far as I am able to see from the GH repo. Thats completely fine with me.
What Dustin did, is build a blogging engine he wanted to use himself. He then invited people he respected to write on the platform, people he knew would deliver a certain standard of quality that he'd love to connect his name to.
He never said the platform would never be opened, in fact it looked like he might do just that some day.
What you did was not just use a concept (add idea to list, expand on it and then publish it when ready), you just took his entire design and published it to the public. Taking a concept and opensourcing it is fine, copying a design and mocking the original creator is not.
As much as I'd like to use Dustin's blogging engine (it's the way I'd like to write), I will never use yours out of principle.
I don't know man, he didn't change all that much if you ask me. He also couldve taken the extra "few hours" to make something that actually looks different before releasing it if you ask me.
If Svbtle's design is that great and reaches any level of popularity, you'll see tons of mimics pop up, and Dustin's so-called vision won't happen anyways.
"As much as I'd like to use Dustin's blogging engine..."
And you can't. Because you're not invited. Because you aren't witty enough.
Maybe dcurtis is not a tool, and he's a great designer, and he just used poor writing to explain that he's testing his blog or curating writers for a network of bloggers. But his exclusionary description, his flippant replies to complaints - these things set off his potential competition. And his response? Ranting and flailing (which he deleted.)
If this entire thing had started with more mild language ("I created this thing to solve these problems. I'm creating a network of bloggers around/under/over/through it. Maybe I'll open it to the world eventually. Or I might not.") then he would have garnered a much more supportive response.
And STILL someone else would have created a clone and made it available publicly. And he could have replied, again, with something less jilted. For example, "It's great these ideas are getting attention. I'm curating writers and you won't get that from a github repo. I'm not crazy about having the design cloned, so might I suggest making your version theme-friendly?"
As to the feelings of Mr. Curtis, I can only say that if this cloning is a problem for him, perhaps he should create works (and make appropriate registrations for those works) with stronger legal protections.
For me, wanting to set up my own blog soon, this ripoff is a goldmine. It's very easy to start off from the current state of obtvse, customize the look and implement custom features, and (hopefully) Nate and others will provide updates to the engine. I say it's a gift to all of us.
Design, especially good design, is hard work. I totally understand a designer being frustrated when their work is copied, even if that copying is reverse-engineered rather than just cut and paste of the css.
Personally, I think the design is ugly and hard to use. The OP (of Obtvse thread) should get a designer and make some much needed changes.
Edit: Downvoters - is it because I said design is hard work, or because I said I thought the design was ugly?
I didn't downvote, but my opinion is this: if you don't want your design copied, make a product that can't be copied easily.
For example, bitbucket copied githubs design for the most part, but people still use github because there is so much more to their product. BB can copy them all they want, but github will have the users and will be considered good design while BB gets called a 'clone'.
If you make a blog platform, which is simple to clone, just open source it and move on. This is a case where imitation should be flattery. Bask in the glory of knowing the world is switching from wordpress to your platform.
(theres also longterm revenue possibilities in that case for a savvy businessmen)
Well I thought about this later and I think that Dustin's ideas of a simple,minimalist blog website do have some value in the creation of this product.But I still think it is extremely low compared to the value of Rails or the server OS(probably Linux) or even the database (probably MySQL) that this product will run on.
Dustin's initial response to this (which he edited later) and his general attitude might have contributed to my opinion.
In 6 months, after Svbtle has grown a bit, I'm going to give you a list of the new features. I'd like to see you build a great UI around them in a few hours.
Taking an existing closed system and opening it is a pretty fundamental part of the hacker ethic. However, it must be done in good faith and good taste.
This is neither. Yes, it's quite hard to draw the line for such things--how big does a company have to be before it's ok? It's a tough question, but despite that ethical uncertainty, this case is pretty clearly on the side of "not ok". Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice.
I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.
I think this is only "not nice" because of the dcurtis's reaction. He could have very easily just replied "Cute." to this thread and accepted the flattery/parody. No one is arguing that "obtvse" is a better product than his own.
For instance, the author of http://drawar.com/ is clearly flattered by dcurtis's own use of his design.
I guess that's what I meant by "good faith". I think making a nigh identical open copy of someone's work is easily predictable to be unpleasant for many people. In plenty of situations (esp on HN and its environs) this is not the case, you can have a reasonable expectation that the person whose work you've been "inspired" by would approve, maybe grudgingly.
I think that in this particular situation, dcurtis's reaction could have been predicated to be at best ambivalent. Thus, choosing to take the liberty of going ahead I consider as "not nice".
Those are about the strongest terms with which I can condemn it though. In another reply to my comment zackattack mentions dcurtis himself isn't nice. That may be the case (although I've seen his name plenty, I'm having enough trouble connecting it to specific writings that I can't agree or disagree), but the crucial issue to determining whether this project is "nice" or not, is whether it was reasonable to expect this action to hurt dcurtis. It clearly did, and since I think that was a plausible outcome, I am uncomfortable with this undertaking.
> Taking an existing closed system and opening it is a pretty fundamental part of the hacker ethic. However, it must be done in good faith and good taste.
1. OpenOffice.org says we don't like MS. How about we clone Office and annoy the fuck out of them?
2. Or MS is making too much money. Let's clone Office and give it up for free. We won't be making any money, but neither would they.
3. Or we are bored the fuck out of our minds. Let's build something - how about Office?
4. Or we are concerned MS's monopolistic policies and binary formats are needlessly tying in users to their platform. We will build something which looks and acts like Office without tying in the user to our product.
These and bazillion of other reasons are equally valid, and you or someone else doesn't have the authority to declare them invalid.
> Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice.
May be this isn't nice. Freedom isn't really freedom if it covers only things you find nice. I would happily trade nice with freedom to independently reproduce something.
> I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.
I really hope he doesn't take down the repo or the site. But if he is bullied into taking it down, even though he wrote the css, ruby, js code for the site, and didn't copy anything from svbtle, I think I will recreate the project. I don't care much about svbtle, but I do care about the freedom to reproduce it if I want it.
As far as design similarities go, it might or might not be copyright infringement - I am not knowledgeable enough to comment. If it is, he can tweak the design a bit to make it look inspired, instead of copied. As already said, if I independently implement a dock for linux(already done; just an example) which looks like Mac's, it's not theft and Apple can suck it if it thinks otherwise.
What is this 'not nice'? What is it really saying?
It seems, for want of a pleasanter term, a bit weasel-worded. It is trying to say 'you should not do that' but while pretending not to be so strong.
If it has any real meaning -- any moral force -- it is saying 'you should not'. But demanding someone behave in a certain way, and so lose their own freedom of choice in the matter, really requires some justification.
So what could be the justification? Merely that one person might feel a little dislike seems insufficient. The thing in (putative) 'contention' is information, but that is nonrival: one person's use does not limit another's. That really seems to reduce the grounds for restricting someone else's freedom here -- 'my freedom ends where your freedom begins', so if there are no substantial limits on the material of our actions, why should it be any business of either to tell the other what to do ? . . .
The new project credits (and links) the previous, and builds on it. That is pretty much everything we should want -- that is the core basics of information culture. (The problem is, our half-conscious social conventions still have not yet grasped the proper ethics of information.)
Those who clamour after Obtvse don't particularly seem like the original target market. The 'Obtvse' network branding will have little weight as well, I think.
Open Source is a long race.
I believe Dustin cares more about HIS creation than some guy who blatantly ripped it off.
To keep contributing to the open source, you need to care beyond "oh, I'm just going to rip off this guy's design because I failed to ask him if he's actually going to open source it, in the first place'.
This whole thing seems like terribly short-sighted thing to do.
I don't understand your post at all. There are hundreds of highly successful long running open source projects and its absurd to imply that someone is more invested in a project purely because it is closed source rather than open.
Further, my comment was merely a testament to the elitism mentioned elsewhere in this thread in regards to Dustin's comment about how his private network is full of geniuses.
When I first saw the screenshots I was impressed. Its nothing terribly new but it is simple and streamlined... but I've been using drafts and published posts in blogger and WordPress for years to do this
I was much less impressed after his comments about geniuses and his big play about exclusivity. Its basically straight up "look at this cool thing that I have, that you can't have, because I'm more of a genius than you."
This us of course isolated from the ethics of cloning the idea... but jeez, at least don't act so damn surprised. This is typical of these scenarios.
When the technical entry level to join the competition is too low, you _should_ expect clones.
Copyright holds automatically on all the code, but just the idea of that kind of blog can't be considered a sufficient "level of creativity" to deserve copyright protection.
376 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadAs a designer, I find it somewhat perplexing that people here demand that code be directly copied for something like this be wrong. Design is more abstract than code, yes, but it's just as fundamental a part of the resulting product.
Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning. Because it is not user facing, identically copied code--when the design has been changed--has no such effects. Why do so many people believe that only copying code should be considered wrong when design has the potential to be more damaging? To me, they are both equally wrong.
Great artists steal. Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just please don't copy my implementation or designs. I need those things to be sacred so I can craft experiences that are not diluted by external factors.
As I stated in my post, I'll be changing my personal design shortly.
This is not original. You copied my design work.
One is the visual design, and even the author agrees that it's probably too similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744356
The other is the idea/concept. Creating open-source versions of unique ideas is nothing new and I doubt you'll see much sympathy on this front.
Granted, latest incarnations of MS's products are a bit different with the (crappy) ribbon and all, but LO is quite similar to previous versions of Office.
And I'm talking both about UI, design and functionality. Think Excel/Calc functions, for example.
You should have confidence that you will win because you can implement it better, understand the need better, can craft better solutions faster, and have better content on your network. If those things aren't true and all you had was an idea, unfortunately this was bound to happen.
Ideas alone are not defensible, practically or even legally. Successful implementations thereof can be however.
Thanks for totally muddying the water, crossing the line, breaking an unwritten rule and not being a "team player".
You quite simply suck.
Not under any definition of "theft" in use outside IP troll offices, as far as I know.
No, never, as long as the open-source alternative doesn't actually copy any copyrightable material from the original (such as images or other data). And I don't see any signs of that here.
On the contrary, creating an open-source alternative to closed-source software is considered awesome.
You have a social/emotional complaint: someone took your good idea (and kudos to you: it's a great idea!), and duplicated it. But it's recognized (and documented here) that you were the progenitor of the idea, and if you eventually open source the original, I can't see how this will "hurt" you. People have an innate sense of fairness, and duplicating ideas like this goes against it in a small way.
But it's not theft (or even copyright infringement), and by overreacting you are going to alienate people who would otherwise be sympathetic.
Feel for you here dcurtis, and surprised people are actually behind this.
Plus, your value is not the app, it's the people in the network, so stay calm and let us not-so-cool people use the open-source clone.
In fact, you could assume the opposite: that, because he is a professional designer, it took him less time to design the app than it would've taken a "layman". (I'm not forgetting about the perfectionism of many designers, mind you)
You can't go around putting the Coke label on different fizzy beverages.
Svbtle is obviously popular for its brand. You are stealing its brand and using it for unintended purposes. The only value in what you've created is that it looks like Dustin's work.
Ripping that off wholesale diminishes the value of something Dustin work(ed/s) very hard to create and curate. Thousands of decisions went into that design. The design is a mark of quality.
Show some respect.
2. Brand? What brand? It's a blogging platform. People don't want it because of a brand. They want it because it's a good idea (simplistic blogging).
3. Coke has a trademarked label. This is merely a website. What is dustin going to trademark/copyright? The ratio of whitespace to small, grey lines?
Maybe if he just took the idea, with the ideas/published and simplified writing screen, he may have a case, but this is clearly stealing the design.
(2) It's pretty confirmed that a lot of our intuitions regarding "theft" require us to see "profit" as a component -- and therefore we are much less likely to see theft in a general design that has been open-sourced. Maybe the clearest way to see this is BSD's libedit, which replicates the GNU Readline library so that you can use it without selling your soul to Stallman. It's an idea rip-off, but it serves a very important charitable function. Startups trying to push product just seem more skeevy.
(3) It is also harder to see something as "theft" if it seems too simple. Nate said, "I whipped open terminal, typed in rails new obtvse, and a few hours later I'm here." That's pretty lightweight, if you're creating a fresh copy from an idea someone gave you.
Edit: (4) Also it's often harder to consider something theft when you cite your sources and say, "okay, this idea comes straight from X, who is awesome -- all credit to them please."
2. I disagree, he's directly taken the fruits of someone elses' labour and given them away without permission. Copying the functionality and idea, I'm fine with, but he didn't "remake" the design like he did the functionality, he just remade the scripting aspect of it. The benefits you mention are functional benefits, and these could have been brought to the public without the near pixel perfect design.
3. I somewhat agree, however I could remake the design of any website without copying and pasting in a short time. It would take a short time because all the time that was spent designing it has been done by someone else.
4. Maybe slightly, but he took what someone else had produced without permission, at best this is a slightly scummy thing to do. He tweeted Dustin to let him know that he had done it, he could have just as easily asked. If Dustin had refused then he'd be free to make something which fulfils the same function, but isn't a clone.
For the record, I'm not sure exactly where I stand regarding IP, but I'm not talking from a legal perspective, just an ethical one, and I don't think this is ethical nor HN's praise of it.
I live in China, a country mocked for its cloning. If the Chinese had hand written the GroupOn site, for example, rather than copy/pasting it, most people who still think it's low. It seems to me more that people think that a) Dustin is a bit of a dick and b) open sourcing something means you can do whatever you like because it's for the good of humanity.
If you open source your version, this will not detract from it. And if you don't, then this gives folks something to use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
I think you should calm down, take a deep breath, accept the compliment, and see how you can work together. It sounds like he'd be happy to help you make it 'ready' faster.
A few days ago, when it was posted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672526), the comments were largely positive.
I'm not saying that nwienert is necessarily right or wrong, but it's strange that this post received such a strong reaction compared to the Font Awesome post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland
However, to get such a patent the design must clearly be novel. Really, really novel. My uncle happens to be a patent lawyer a.d. who fought a lot of cases about product design for a big telco in the European patents court in his time. Knowing a few of his cases, I strongly doubt dcurtis design would be eligible for a design patent in Europe.
The blog itself (it's functionality) would fail an attempt to patented for similar reasons. Apart from that, yes there is copyright everywhere but where this starts in cases like the one at hand is a gray area at best.
[1] http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/treaties/en/ip/berne/pd...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity (in US copyright law)
[3] http://norcal.gag.org/legalities/2004/legalities_no03.html (first question)
I guess my point was that all that doesn't matter if the original design doesn't exhibit enough originality (I used the term 'novel').
To give an example: if I have an A4 page with left aligned text, that looks very similar to any other A4 page with left aligned text that happens to use the same font size and line height.
In the case at hand, the design wasn't even dcurtis', he presumably took it from http://drawar.com/ Or maybe not?
With a design so simple, similarity by coincidence can't be ruled out. I wouldn't be surprised if another dozen websites existed that exhibited a /very/ similar design.
I'm not sure where the idea comes from that when someone displays displeasure with something, they want it to be illegal. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's good.Just because it's not good doesn't mean it should be illegal.
Does that mean it will be open to _anyone_ and no longer only to people considered to be "intelligent, creative, and witty"?
My blog has a similar minimal design and its just a stock Tubmlr one.
drewblaisdell said (to Dustin):
> How different would you say his parody of your site is than your site is of http://drawar.com/ ?
I said I don't see how Svbtle is a copy of drawar.com:
> I don't see it; the whole workflow - draft to publish columns and such - is the same at drawar, or?
So I do not think that Svbtle is a rip-off of drawar.com.
Now if there's anything unique about Svbtle compared to the blogging systems I've personally used, its the draft thing (as explained in the Svbtle article we all read here on HN a few hours before this one).
My tumblr has drafts; but its not this trello-like list organising thing. As Dustin says, it helps make stories happen and posts get written.
Also it was FAR from a pixel-for-pixel exact duplication. Spacing around the site is still different, as is the font and font sizing.
I think you should realize you overreacted a bit. It was simply an experiment and a way to give back to the community.
these discussions only happen for it products. can't see mr. porsche complaining about enzo ferrari (when still alive... yea. those were the days!).
http://briefmobile.com/images/articles/galaxy-s-vs-iphone.jp...
You are on the left.
Any semi-competent programmer can reproduce it within a day or two(the OP did it in a shorter span of time). That won't help, and you aren't entitled to what you think you are.
And the work is totally his. The design was too similar, but still, its his work. He didn't steal your css or images, and though you might feel rough about it, it doesn't make it theft as you are putting it again and again.
> Just wait until Svbtle is finished and open to the public. The reason it's closed is really simple: it's not ready yet.
Great for people who want to blog on Svbtle. If I don't and I like the idea, I am going to implement it and use it. I am glad we don't live in a world where you or anyone else can stop me from doing it.
The hard part was coming up with the original concept and design - kudos to you for the great work. Reproducing it is easy, and I don't think you have any right to stop me from doing it.
As another commenter pointed out, we don't actually want a world where Apple says MS stole its windows.
I would never repaint van Gogh, because I'd rather paint my own things. On the other hand, if I were to want a Thomas Kincade painting (for some ghastly reason), I'd definitely buy the cheapest reproduction I could find, because the original painting just wasn't that valuable to begin with.
If I were a painter, I would paint me the hell out of some van Gogh. In every skill I've practiced seeing what the masters do, reproducing it (especially figuring out _why_ they did it that way) has been a very useful learning technique.
More to the point of your post, and this story: Would I sell my van Gogh copies? Probably not. Not because I think there's something terribly wrong about it. Mostly because they'd still be inferior to the original.
I would certainly give them away to friends who wanted to hang it in their den or library, though.
Unfortunately, you picked a bad example: a painting is a finite resource -- there is only one physical painting painted by the original artist. A painting cannot be "copied" with the same veracity as software can be (bitwise, which in the case of software becomes piracy) and any attempt to pass a "copy" of a painting as an original is forgery.
Classifying any work (art/software) as a rip-off requires defining the very fine line between fair-use and unfair forgery. When it comes to artistic endeavors (as in "design"), you'll have more luck defining the position and velocity of an electron around a nucleus than delineating that fair/unfair boundary.
I realize this is not the mainstream HN view. Accepted wisdom says if you can copy something, than you may copy it. But I just don't get it. If you value someone's work, I think you owe them some form of compensation.
There's a line I read on 1001 Rules For My Unborn Son, "If a street performer makes you stop walking, you owe him a buck." I tend to agree with this, both literally and metaphorically.
I agree that good ideas shouldn't be trapped or left to wither in isolation when they could benefit society at large. I just think this has to be tempered with some form of compensation to the person who introduced the idea.
But I'm open to being convinced otherwise if anyone has a good argument to the contrary.
I am quoting this example for the second time. MS made Office common place. It doesn't mean OpenOffice.org owed MS anything, other than "hey neat". As long as it's not infringement recognized by law, no body owes anyone anything.
> if you can copy something, than you may copy it.
"can copy" is hard, may be a little less hard than the first implementation, but it's still hard work. You don't get exclusivity by getting there first. In the cases in which you do get it viz. software patents, it creates more problems than it solves. So yes, I am pretty much in line with "if you can copy it, you may".
> If you value someone's work, I think you owe them some form of compensation.
It's entirely possible to value someone's work, but not agree with his exclusivity requirements.
> I agree that good ideas shouldn't be trapped or left to wither in isolation when they could benefit society at large. I just think this has to be tempered with some form of compensation to the person who introduced the idea.
And I think "I was here first so you all are prosecuting me by not going somewhere else and trying to get here" is a prefect way to let good ideas wither and die. More importantly, this sense of exclusivity and entitlement is misplaced.
If something is inevitable or trivial (slide to unlock, one-click checkout), I don't think there should be any protection at all.
But the more original something is, the more the creator has actually added to society by creating it. And yes, copying it can add to society as well by making it universal, but I think some kind of monetary incentive is a great way to get people to work on original ideas.
Would Apple be so creative if they weren't so profitable? Isn't it their profitability which gives them the ability to spend time and money on R&D? If you take away the profit, don't you take away the opportunity to do R&D?
I think this is why patents were introduced in the first place. I don't think patents work for software, but I think the idea is the same. For the greatest good for society, we want lots and lots of universally applied creative ideas. But there's a trade-off between encouraging new ideas and encouraging mass distribution of ideas. "IP" laws encourage new ideas but discourage sharing. "Piracy" encourages sharing but discourages new ideas.
I just think that there needs to be a balance, and that "thanks for doing the hard work, I'll take it from here" isn't it.
EDIT: I would appreciate an explanation of why people feel I am not contributing.
If Apple's profit equates to Android not doing what they are doing, Apple going bankrupt will be a fair trade in my book. If Apple comes up with something original, which Android re-implements, it doesn't owe Apple anything, even if it affects Apple's profits. Apple working on original things and being in business is good, but not so much that others' ability to re-implement things be taken away.
Android has different hardware, a different OS, a different programming language for development, etc.
At the most precise level, copying music creates and absolutely perfect copy. There is literally no difference between the original file and the new one.
Would it be fair for someone to make an exact copy of an iPhone, running an exact copy of iOS and then distribute it?
I think the precision of the copy has a great deal to do with whether it's OK or not, which I think is what Dustin was getting at when he said it's OK to steal his ideas but not his implementation.
Maybe he doesn't get to draw the line wherever he likes, but it seems there ought to be a line somewhere.
Not only that, but I saw the original, and it wasn't.
You have inverted the moral terrain, and you are now going to have to defend your own credibility / honesty when you are leveling those same accusations at someone else.
As to writing it.. you made a fairly big splashy announcement about this great new concept in blogging, and then made it invitation only. That's guaranteed to get push back from the community, especially one that considers ideas only good for execution!
It seems fairly simple to implement - you might claim some moral ownership of the concept, but that probably won't hold up well, either, in this community.
This is community that lives on the maxim of "release early and iterate", we're not always looking for a slick finished product. So now you have competition; may the best product win!
(It may seem cruel, Dustin, but you do have an attitude - and that seems to have grated on people. So, maybe this gives you an experience of the same feeling. Just saying.)
EDIT: Dustin's edited response is interesting; as a programmer I probably don't set as much store by the elements of design as he (naturally) does - simple things don't represent a creative element, to me in the same way. Which is interesting food for thought.
Hopefully Nate will continue to move his design away from Dustin's
Basic layout? Also the color scheme, font hierarchy, whitespace around elements (which is a critical portion of the design), and basically every trick dcurtis used to draw the eye and maintain the mental flow of the app.
With that said; you are right about font/colors (I hadn't noticed).
I give credit to Nate for taking steps to address those similarities following feedback, and I hope he goes further with that.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/byword/id420212497?mt=12&...
http://textroom.sourceforge.net/images/odtexport1.png
The fonts are not the same the relative font sizes are a bit different (Dustin's has bigger text).
I think you've captured the essence of why some HN readers think Dustin had this coming, so to speak. The act of making the system exclusive is abrasive to so many hackers, where information is free to all, and the modifiers of this information are those with the recognizable merit to affect it. Dustin released his project in a Bizarro world version of the open source process, where information is chained and those granted access are selected in private, with no transparency of the criteria.
In fact, I would say Dustin did have it coming. That's what open source tends to do, like it or not. You only have to look back at the most popular proprietary systems of note to see that hackers love to imitate these products, if not downright replace them. Unix? Linux. Microsoft Office? LibreOffice. TiVo? MythTv. Hell, there's even a SimCity imitation called LinCity! The jackals, as Nolan Bushnell called them, are out in force--and if you haven't noticed, that's the way things have been for the last 30 years. It was inevitable that Svbtle would be "liberated". What's actually amazing is that this time it only took ten hours.
Now, if I were Dustin, I would likely be offended that my code had been reverse-engineered so closely. If I presented my code with the attitude that it is better than sliced bread, yeah, I would definitely feel wronged by my design being copied. I can sympathize with that. But I can't sympathize with the bubble in which Svbtle was presented. It came off as pretentious. There's no room for that in this day and age. And I'm not saying that Dustin Curtis deserved to have his design imitated because he was pretentious, oh no. I'm saying that he should not be so surprised that it happened. Curtis's attitude led to an imitation surfacing in such short time. Dustin's attitude affected Nate on an emotional level--and that's what brings out the jackal in open source hackers.
I agree with your third paragraph; I sympathise with Dustin's viewpoint (though I don't entirely agree with it). I don't think he deserved the imitation, but his approach pretty much guaranteed it.
But I can't bring myself to criticise Nate either, because, as you say, he followed the typical hacker ethics - which is that if something good isn't accessible, make it so. I like that social structure; it adds competition and forces products to be the very best they can. It avoids the situation where one person can control an idea by virtue of being the first mover.
Nate misfired by being similar to the original design, I for one (and I can understand Dustin feeling differently) can forgive that mistake partly as a "hacked together in a night" job and partly because the design elements (only in my opinion) are not revolutionary. Provided he works to fix that issue (some of which he has done) then I see no problem.
I was thinking about this over coffee... I am sure that a lot of thought and effort went into Svbtle and its design; both thought and coding (no idea how much of a coder Dustin is). It's tempting to see Nate's work as hurried and with less value - but he put his skill as a coder into cloning it in a night, and he seems to want to pursue the idea further. Many of the best projects in the world started as hacked up examples, clones or tests. And, again, I am a sucker for "released early, accepting patches" :)
Which is why, morally, I'm with Nate - because his whole approach seems "nicer" than Dustin's. If this platform goes the distance, who would I want to see at the helm? Perhaps the wrong measure, but I'm only human :)
That strongly implies the free version will be not-good, because there are many more ways to be not-good than to be different-good.
Design is a fundamental part of the product - no body is contesting it. Personally I am taking exception to your exclusivity expectations. I have given it a lot of thought, and I believe the current optimum is he can rip off your design and only thing you can do about it is feel outraged. The alternative is scary - if this sort of exclusivity requirements are enforced, Apple would shutdown MS over supposedly copying windows and Android over copying "swipe to unlock".
> Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning.
That's how free market works.
> Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just don't copy my implementation or designs.
I can choose to play nice, or I can rip you off wholesale. As long as I am within the realms of law, it's fair game. You might not like it, but it's better than the alternatives where you can dictate what I can and can not do just because you did something first.
Takes a lot to admit this, especially publicly. Hopefully if I find myself in a similar situation, I'll do the same thing, and in less than an hour after my initial reaction.
If HN had Kudos buttons, I'd hover my mouse over yours for a few seconds.
To see the HN community defending this is really sad.
Dustin himself had asked people not to copy his work and that he was releasing it publicly:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742596
It's bullshit like this that discourages good ideas from being shared.
I don't understand how reusing/copying something finely done reduce its sacredness/sanctity.
Perhaps svbtle's invite-only status made people feel like outsiders, perhaps something you've done in the past rubbed someone the wrong way - either way, I suspect the personal dislike comes first and the justification for the action comes second. If the design of a much-beloved figure here was stolen, I suspect the reaction and the arguments in the thread would be very different.
Stanley Fish wrote an interesting opinion piece recently about this impulse, applied to politics:
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/two-cheers...
You say "In fact, it goes against the very ethos of Hacker News.", do you think your action aligns with the "ethos of Hacker News"? Do you think it's okay to rip-off something just because you think it shouldn't be invite only?
But if I you take the design and make your version look the same, then it's a rip-off. Yes, you modified it. But please put both versions next to each other and tell me they don't look like each other. As long as you don't have an original design it's a rip-off for me.
http://bobcargill.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/geocities-izer...
Yes?
When the idea is the design (as is the case with visitor.js), no there is not. In both cases, it's taking and reimplementing wholesale (but from scratch) the closed product into an open-source one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416
"I'm super impressed you turned this out so quickly. I think that really sums up the spirit in the HN community... When you look at something that seems overpriced (or wrongly-priced) and you say "hey, I bet I could do this""
> But the fact is - they created something and shared it here. If you think you can do a better job at it - fine, but why haven't you done it before, or at the very least named it differently. I don't mean to exaggerate, but it just doesn't feel ethical to me.
"It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."
It is hard to tell if all the people who jump to the defense of Curtis are also defenders of copyright for music and films, but judging from the comment distribution I think at some people here have to be hypocrites.
No matter how much RIAA and MPAA would like to change it, recording covers for existing music, I believe, is fully supported culturally and legally.
Yes, so long as the correct licences are paid. If it's a live cover the venue will be paying licence fees and if it's a recorded cover the band will need licence as soon as they start distributing it.
One guy being annoyed that his super-elite design can be replicated in a matter of hours is not a reason to backtrack.
It took Curtis a lifetime of experience to end up with this design. Simplicity doesn't mean there wasn't hard work behind it.
If it took more hours, would it be a bigger reason to backtrack?
Notice the name, "obtuse".. But I am glad I got this response, it's been both entertaining and enlightening!
so you torpedoed Dustin doing so? Nice.
Carbon copying for vanity just doesn't my respect.
I guess thats why many of you US guys like patents and shit so much. It just makes no effing sense.
He created everything from scratch as far as I am able to see from the GH repo. Thats completely fine with me.
Making a Free replacement or, more awesome, a better product is worthy of the adulation of your peers.
When Microsoft China copied the layout of whatever website it was we all came down on them from our principled pinnacles though, didn't we?
Guess people really like pirates then, of course, this is Hacker News after all.
He never said the platform would never be opened, in fact it looked like he might do just that some day.
What you did was not just use a concept (add idea to list, expand on it and then publish it when ready), you just took his entire design and published it to the public. Taking a concept and opensourcing it is fine, copying a design and mocking the original creator is not.
As much as I'd like to use Dustin's blogging engine (it's the way I'd like to write), I will never use yours out of principle.
Where did Nate mock Dustin, or even speak negatively about him? Reading his post I find only one mildly negative comment:
"I felt Dustin missed out on what have been a great open source contribution."
Still doesn't change how I feel about this. He could have opensourced the engine on itself, taking the design as well is a blatant ripoff.
Another thing is this: The goal is simple: when you see the Svbtle design, you should know that the content is guaranteed to be great.
By stealing the design, he is completely boycotting Dustin at making this vision of his come true.
I'd chalk the design similarity up to "I...typed in rails new obtvse, and a few hours later I'm here."
The writing platform that helps you liberate ideas. With just two features, it's the essence of blogging.
Membership by invitation only.
And you can't. Because you're not invited. Because you aren't witty enough.
Maybe dcurtis is not a tool, and he's a great designer, and he just used poor writing to explain that he's testing his blog or curating writers for a network of bloggers. But his exclusionary description, his flippant replies to complaints - these things set off his potential competition. And his response? Ranting and flailing (which he deleted.)
If this entire thing had started with more mild language ("I created this thing to solve these problems. I'm creating a network of bloggers around/under/over/through it. Maybe I'll open it to the world eventually. Or I might not.") then he would have garnered a much more supportive response.
And STILL someone else would have created a clone and made it available publicly. And he could have replied, again, with something less jilted. For example, "It's great these ideas are getting attention. I'm curating writers and you won't get that from a github repo. I'm not crazy about having the design cloned, so might I suggest making your version theme-friendly?"
As to the feelings of Mr. Curtis, I can only say that if this cloning is a problem for him, perhaps he should create works (and make appropriate registrations for those works) with stronger legal protections.
Blogpost: "Kudos suck"
In my opinion the layout of a blogging website falls more in the realm of fashion than intellectual property.
Some real intellectual property here is Rails itself which thankfully is open.
Personally, I think the design is ugly and hard to use. The OP (of Obtvse thread) should get a designer and make some much needed changes.
Edit: Downvoters - is it because I said design is hard work, or because I said I thought the design was ugly?
For example, bitbucket copied githubs design for the most part, but people still use github because there is so much more to their product. BB can copy them all they want, but github will have the users and will be considered good design while BB gets called a 'clone'.
If you make a blog platform, which is simple to clone, just open source it and move on. This is a case where imitation should be flattery. Bask in the glory of knowing the world is switching from wordpress to your platform.
(theres also longterm revenue possibilities in that case for a savvy businessmen)
Dustin's initial response to this (which he edited later) and his general attitude might have contributed to my opinion.
Taking an existing closed system and opening it is a pretty fundamental part of the hacker ethic. However, it must be done in good faith and good taste.
This is neither. Yes, it's quite hard to draw the line for such things--how big does a company have to be before it's ok? It's a tough question, but despite that ethical uncertainty, this case is pretty clearly on the side of "not ok". Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice.
I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.
Maybe if Dustin were a nice guy, your argument would have some validity.
We should never give up ourselves to being/doing something simply because John Smith does it.
For instance, the author of http://drawar.com/ is clearly flattered by dcurtis's own use of his design.
I think that in this particular situation, dcurtis's reaction could have been predicated to be at best ambivalent. Thus, choosing to take the liberty of going ahead I consider as "not nice".
Those are about the strongest terms with which I can condemn it though. In another reply to my comment zackattack mentions dcurtis himself isn't nice. That may be the case (although I've seen his name plenty, I'm having enough trouble connecting it to specific writings that I can't agree or disagree), but the crucial issue to determining whether this project is "nice" or not, is whether it was reasonable to expect this action to hurt dcurtis. It clearly did, and since I think that was a plausible outcome, I am uncomfortable with this undertaking.
That's certainly true. Linux and the BSD's pretty much killed the commercial Unix market, which had to be very unpleasant for some people.
1. OpenOffice.org says we don't like MS. How about we clone Office and annoy the fuck out of them?
2. Or MS is making too much money. Let's clone Office and give it up for free. We won't be making any money, but neither would they.
3. Or we are bored the fuck out of our minds. Let's build something - how about Office?
4. Or we are concerned MS's monopolistic policies and binary formats are needlessly tying in users to their platform. We will build something which looks and acts like Office without tying in the user to our product.
These and bazillion of other reasons are equally valid, and you or someone else doesn't have the authority to declare them invalid.
> Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice.
May be this isn't nice. Freedom isn't really freedom if it covers only things you find nice. I would happily trade nice with freedom to independently reproduce something.
> I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.
I really hope he doesn't take down the repo or the site. But if he is bullied into taking it down, even though he wrote the css, ruby, js code for the site, and didn't copy anything from svbtle, I think I will recreate the project. I don't care much about svbtle, but I do care about the freedom to reproduce it if I want it.
As far as design similarities go, it might or might not be copyright infringement - I am not knowledgeable enough to comment. If it is, he can tweak the design a bit to make it look inspired, instead of copied. As already said, if I independently implement a dock for linux(already done; just an example) which looks like Mac's, it's not theft and Apple can suck it if it thinks otherwise.
It seems, for want of a pleasanter term, a bit weasel-worded. It is trying to say 'you should not do that' but while pretending not to be so strong.
If it has any real meaning -- any moral force -- it is saying 'you should not'. But demanding someone behave in a certain way, and so lose their own freedom of choice in the matter, really requires some justification.
So what could be the justification? Merely that one person might feel a little dislike seems insufficient. The thing in (putative) 'contention' is information, but that is nonrival: one person's use does not limit another's. That really seems to reduce the grounds for restricting someone else's freedom here -- 'my freedom ends where your freedom begins', so if there are no substantial limits on the material of our actions, why should it be any business of either to tell the other what to do ? . . .
The new project credits (and links) the previous, and builds on it. That is pretty much everything we should want -- that is the core basics of information culture. (The problem is, our half-conscious social conventions still have not yet grasped the proper ethics of information.)
Just keep improving Svbtle and release it when it's ready.
To keep contributing to the open source, you need to care beyond "oh, I'm just going to rip off this guy's design because I failed to ask him if he's actually going to open source it, in the first place'.
This whole thing seems like terribly short-sighted thing to do.
So, Keep Calm and Carry On. The race is long.
Further, my comment was merely a testament to the elitism mentioned elsewhere in this thread in regards to Dustin's comment about how his private network is full of geniuses.
When I first saw the screenshots I was impressed. Its nothing terribly new but it is simple and streamlined... but I've been using drafts and published posts in blogger and WordPress for years to do this
I was much less impressed after his comments about geniuses and his big play about exclusivity. Its basically straight up "look at this cool thing that I have, that you can't have, because I'm more of a genius than you."
This us of course isolated from the ethics of cloning the idea... but jeez, at least don't act so damn surprised. This is typical of these scenarios.
Suggested new name: Gavche
(Clone away.)
Copyright holds automatically on all the code, but just the idea of that kind of blog can't be considered a sufficient "level of creativity" to deserve copyright protection.