Metalab's Andrew Wilkinson responds again: (The Great Mozilla Debacle)
blog.metalabdesign.com
blog.metalabdesign.com
By making such a line-in-the-sand issue out of this, they portray themselves as (a) small, (b) insecure, and (c) immature. Mozilla showed no ill intention (and there is plenty of that out there), no high level commitment (this is a Labs project that hasn't been released), and were immediately responsive to the situation.
The issue here is that this could have easily been resolved with an email or a phone call. A savvy salesman would probably recognize continued interest by the client and follow up with a stronger sell. Instead, they threw mud, and lots of it. They replaced their landing page with mud flinging, just in case anyone who was unaware of the situation stopped by their website to do business.
Above all, this skirmish tells me that when you do business with MetaLab, you are doing business with a single person, and that person is still pretty green. He has some great designers working with him, but they might be better off at a bigger, less inexperienced firm (hint, hint, competitors).
I also learned of a site http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ designed by http://www.31three.com/portfolio/ that is exactly the same as and predates MetaLab's http://www.getballpark.com/
From a startup founder point of view, I think Andrew did exactly the right thing. He massively increased the profile of his company and he got an apology from Mozilla.
At the cost of a lot of potential clients. A lot of companies will hesitate to deal with MetaLab in future, considering that MetaLab are not even apologetic about making this a PR issue rather than talking to Mozilla first. When a company redirects its landing page to a blog post about being ripped off, they just look like a bunch of immature kids.
There should more of an open source culture among designers. It works for programmers, why not designers?
Perhaps it would lead to fewer rip offs if there was quality open source designs to build on ("source" meaning the original .psd's or equivalent). It also would help create better looking open source software and websites.
Is there anything equivalent to GitHub in the design world? (deviantART with less anime drawings, maybe)
The best part of owning a business is getting to handle situations like this however you want, and living with the consequences on your own terms.
My opinion is that running a business more often than not requires, for lack of a better term, "having balls". You need to make difficult and tough decisions on a day to day basis. You need to be able to follow through and stand behind what you're doing.
As far as MetaLab's success, I have no idea whether or not my business is doing better or worse than MetaLab. MetaLab appears to have a steady stream of projects. And, don't get me wrong, I think Andrew is a great designer (as are his colleagues). I just think that his handling of these situations, especially the Mozilla situation, has been poor. I also think he needs to grow a pair and learn to defend his designs directly instead of engaging in theatrics via his blog and Twitter.
The best part of owning a business is getting to handle situations like this however you want, and living with the consequences on your own terms.
I think that brandon272 has a point, but he didn't articulate it very well. MetaLab has been successful, but I don't think that stunts like this have caused them to be successful.
Let's be clear: Andrew is successfully running his own business. You're a silly person on the internet. You might want to take that into account when deriving your rules.