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Comment by xenihn | Hacker News Reader

It is really shitty that there is no credit or attribution whatsoever, and I understand how you feel. Some UX designer / product designer at Strava copied your idea and claimed it as their own.

There's a difference between spending days or weeks researching competitors and formulating your own composite of something and what happened here.

Strava doesn't really have any legal risk by just admitting that they copied you. The evidence is there. It's just managers and their design subordinates wanting to save face.

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> It is really shitty that there is no credit or attribution whatsoever

As pointed out on Twitter, the Footpath app isn't complying with the attribution guidelines for the OpenStreetMap data that it uses:

https://twitter.com/iamnunocaldeira/status/11011052697933086...

OSM requests that "for a browsable electronic map, the credit should appear in the corner of the map". Footpath doesn't do this. It hides it away on a credits page.

Using the volunteer work of thousands of mappers, then refusing to comply with their stated attribution request, is really low. I had a lot of sympathy with Footpath before I realised this.

This is shitty, and if your post is true, I hope Footpath's owner addresses it, since they are (or were) actively participating in this discussion.

If you click through to the Twitter thread, there is a very active discussion and there still seems to be a lot of disagreement within the OpenStreetMap community on the topic of attribution, particularly on mobile.

Footpath uses the Mapbox SDK under the hood, and I was following Mapbox's documentation on attribution when I integrated the SDK.

I'm following the conversation, and plan to update the attribution once some consensus arises from the discussion.

Most of the "disagreement" is from Mapbox.

I don’t really see the reason to credit here. As a product developer you obviously draw inspiration from your competition, and do whatever you need to keep up and hopefully get ahead. This is in my opinion exactly the same as Instagram implementing stories from Snapchat. Doing so is perfectly fine, entirely legal, and in this sense being a gentleman and not implementing the feature will cause you to be set back compared to the competition.

Why are you bringing up the question of if it's illegal or not when no one else is? There's no dispute as to whether or not it's illegal -- it isn't. There's no argument there. There's realistically, nothing to be afraid of from a legal standpoint, which is what makes the behavior from organizations with large legal resources so puzzling.

People keep bringing up Facebook/Instagram and Snapchat. Facebook/Instagram has had no issue with admitting that Snapchat was an inspiration, so that doesn't help your argument. The issue here is credit and attribution, not legality or morality.

> This is in my opinion exactly the same as Instagram implementing stories from Snapchat.

As someone in an earlier comment pointed out, Instagram credited Snapchat.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/02/silicon-copy/

> The one thing you never hear in Silicon Valley is an entrepreneur admit they copied someone else. Yet there in the headquarters of Facebook, the world’s most prolific product cloner, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom surprised me.

This is uncool of Strava to the point that I'm quite certain that I don't want a Strava subscription anymore so I cancelled it just now.

I'm of the opinion that if it's out there, it's fair game to copy. It's the original holder's responsibility to include a little je ne sai quoi to prevent that from happening

Speaking as someone who had his entire codebase ripped off and rebranded, whole cloth. (Though they forgot to edit the EULA)

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