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Comment by dangoldin | Hacker News Reader

I'd make a counterpoint. It probably took Dustin years to get to the skill level he's at now. Most of the work here was in the design and "ideation" stage rather than the CSS/HTML/JS. Once something is built it only requires the necessary tech skills to copy it.

Reminds me of a story about Picasso: A woman asks Picasso to paint a painting of her, five minutes later there's a wonderful painting of her. When she asks Picasso how much she owes, he quotes her 5,000 francs. She's surprised by how much it is and tells him that it only took him 5 minutes. He responds with "No, it took me my entire life."

This is an extreme comparison but I just want to highlight that there's a value to the experience that people have. As hackers we tend to underestimate that since we focus on the more visible tech skills.

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I take your point but let me offer a counter-counterpoint. :)

The OP likewise spent his life (or some substantial part thereof) honing the skills required to do this (and do it in a short space of time) then give it away for free including source code.

At that point you have to acknowledge either the significant charity of that act or the relatively small nature of the original idea (not to belittle or impugn dcurtis's abilities, motives or skills in any way).

Look, I would take this as a relatively cheap entrepreneurial lesson: if your idea is extremely reproducible it can still be a business but you need to be first and you need to be ready to scale. Invite-only works for things that are hard to reproduce and/or have some kind of lock-in or network effect.

Fair enough and I see both sides. Execution of course matters but there is also value in being first and taking the right marketing approach. When building a product it's also important to consider the pricing, the marketing, etc since they will determine success or failure.

Definitely a good lesson and that's why one needs to view the product with a wider perspective which should dictate the right strategy to take.

It's a complicated issue without a clean or simple answer. Arguably this is why different people have different thoughts on the software patent issue. Most people have a very black and white view of it but there's a lot of nuance that makes the issue shades of gray.

I also suspect the reaction would be entirely different (I think someone mentioned it in this thread) if Nate didn't open source it. I wonder why that's the case.

>> Execution of course matters but there is also value in being first and taking the right marketing approach.

I absolutely agree with you. I think for a lot of people, including myself, however, the best marketing approach would have been to say "check this out, I did something cool, and I've open sourced it." This is what dcurtis probably should have done. He didn't do any groundbreaking rails code, and there was very little value in having a new workflow of blogging exist only on his servers. I think the value of Nate open sourcing it is much higher than if he had just built a clone and kept it to himself.

Basically, the community response supporting Nate is strong because he did something that benefits the community as a whole, where as dcurtis did something that benefited only himself and then shouted about it.

That's my (pretty myopic and polemic) take on all this.

Thats a nice story. But it misses the point: what if an equally good painter sat next to picasso, came up with a similar painting in another 5 minutes and gave it to the woman for free (maybe hes angered by picasso and love free art), how would picasso react? We don't know.

But what if the other painter, seeing Picasso's painting, painted another, not based off of the woman, but based off of Picasso's painting? Would that be considered theft?

It would be considered theft if the other painter hopped over to picasso, took the origial picture and handed it to the woman. To add some spice to the scene, maybe he hits picasso in the process, which would add assault. But, as many others have pointed out: copyright violations are not theft.

But as the story is not about copyright, but about perceived entitlement, its also completely irrelevant.

I think with code, there are a million ways to clone something (...especially when you haven't seen the source) so it's harder for developers to understand what it feels like when you see someone copy your designs (to clarify, I'm speaking generally here.) Best allusion I can think of is joke stealing. A lot of work can go into a one liner. Does it matter if it took 5 seconds (or 11 hours in this case) to copy it?

Fact is, if Dustin hadn't done anything innovative (ie, worth cloning), we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Innovative and worth cloning are completely different standards. There is nothing at all innovative about what Dustin did. Someone else thought it would be nice to play around with, and made it. I am part of this conversation because it is about "theft", not because I think that either post is in itself notable.

Let me make a better parallel: a lemonade stand. Dustin thought "wow, the weather is nice. I'd like some lemonade." He made some especially good lemonade, added a little cranberry, and wrote about how good it was. Someone else, who hadn't previously wanted lemonade thought, "hey, I would also like some lemonade. Hadn't thought of cranberry before, I wonder if that's any good..."

And now we're having a conversation about how anyone who makes cranberry lemonade is stealing from Dustin.

Or rather Dustin made some cranberry lemonade but only for himself and his friends. Dustin posted a picture of him and his friends enjoying this lemonade together and Nate sees this and thinks it's sad that Dustin is so stingy with his great lemonade. So Nate makes his own lemonade that's really similar and shares the recipe with everyone and invites them to make it better. Now, everyone can make, mix and enjoy their own lemonade - and it is good.

I think our respective metaphors for the situation show we're coming from different places -- I'm definitely biased towards the design because I think it solves a functional problem rather than just adding a dash of zest. Appreciate your thoughts and perspective, ynniv. Now to buy some lemonade...

I'm missing the substance beyond the zest. Are you saying that a drafts folder is innovative? I think that beyond bias, you're focused on the design. I suspect that if Obtvse did not use the same visual design, and show up in a similar forum in close proximity to the original announcement, I expect you would likely think nothing of it.

>Fact is, if Dustin hadn't done anything innovative (ie, worth cloning), we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I think the conversation is being had more because of the way Dustin presented what he did rather than what he presented.

Wasn't it Picasso who said "Good artists copy, great artists steals"? Is this good or great?

Sadly ideas aren't valued in the business world, only execution is promoted as the important part - so people trying to make profit can feel less guilty.

You can't really have success without both. The execution is a lot easier to see so there is definitely a bias towards that.

Many successful have had both. You can make the case that Steve Jobs drove the Apple ideas but Tim Cook was the one who made sure the entire production chain was as efficiently run as possible.

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