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Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to look any further than the OS and applications you're using right now to see the heavy re-use of design elements and UI paradigms between competing applications. Without it happening we'd probably all be using significantly worse software.

Used to be the community was heavily in favor of look and feel being free game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_v._Microsoft

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland

League for Programming Freedom (LPF) was founded in 1989 by Richard Stallman to unite free software developers as well as developers of proprietary software to fight against software patents and the extension of the scope of copyright [...] The single event that had the most influence on the creation of the League was Apple's lawsuits against Microsoft about supposed copyrights violations of the look and feel of the Macintosh as copied in Microsoft Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_for_Programming_Freedom

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For sure, the origin of creative work is always murky and collaborative, but there are lines and this theft flagrantly crosses them. Copying someone else's hard work and selling it as your own is bullshit and deserves to be called such. I don't think there is any defense for this kind of blatant copying. (Not to mention bad copying. It's amazing how, even with a good design to crib from they managed to mess up all sorts of important details.)

I'd be interested in an example or two of what MobileRSS messed up. Just curious - I don't use either of these apps.

The lack of padding on the text of the article view stands out. http://fireballed.org/linked/2010/12/22/reeder-rip/

I assure you that if you had used both quattro pro and lotus 1-2-3 you wouldn't be thinking that we're discussing the "murky and collaborative nature of creative work" - we're talking about imitation. Interface cloning and heavy borrowing of element layouts has a long and storied history in software design - look at any modern GUI and they all look much more similar than dissimilar. Is that the murky and collaborative nature of creative work? Hell no, it's people copying off of each other. And it's a good thing, unless you think it'd be a great idea to have to retrain everyone every time IT wanted to switch application providers (that used to be common).

Assuming you still disagree, I'd be curious about your opinion of non design issues. Do you think samba is bullshit for having reverse engineered the CIFS interface allowing non windows computers to share on corporate lans? How about various office applications that reverse engineered the file formats of various closed competitors to allow them to save and load the formats? Surely a lot of hard work went into designing CIFS or .xls, should that be off limits as well? If not, why is the location of buttons on a screen a bigger deal than the locations of bytes in a filehandle?

I'm sorry, I was too brief in my original comment. I shouldn't have brushed off imitation in design by talking about the murky nature of the origin of creative work. You are quite right that a lot of good has come from people stealing other people's design work; when people come up with something new and good, it is usually a good thing for others in the field to incorporate them into their own work. That's how we move forward. I mean, Reeder straight up copied the "pull to refresh" UI element from Tweetie.

But, as in all things, there is a balance, and one can go too far. What the developers of MobileRSS did is not wrong because they copied, it is wrong because they only copied, and didn't make it better. They didn't incorporate good ideas from Reeder into their own, making something new and beautiful, but rather substituted Silvio's ideas for their own which is lazy and the opposite of good work. I know whose future development I want to support.

There is a big difference between using the same techniques and making a clone. This is repainting someone else's painting (badly) and passing it off as your original creative endevour. I have no problem with everyone using menus and palettes, but cloning does not advance anything.

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