> Those are not exact copies of the interface we're discussing here.
Not my race, not my horse. However, you have to actively try to ignore the similarities (Excel vs OfficeSuite pictured here): https://imgur.com/a/q0T4uaD It's very much not a clean room design.
> You're basically saying that all of the work on https://dribble.com/ for example, is royalty free and I can copy whatever I see there and make it my own?
Royalty free? No.
Can you copy it, though? If you are in a country that doesn't care about IP or can get away with it, e.g. if what you create won't have enough visibility to get you into trouble, or you're in circumstances where prosecution is unlikely? I don't doubt that a lot of people are doing exactly that. You can probably do whatever you want as long as your risk tolerance is high enough and eventually you don't mind receiving a cease & desist in the mail.
It's much the same with the various attempts at recreating Windows/Mac UI/UX in the various *nix distros out there, or whatever the people behind Wubuntu were trying to do with a very clear financial incentive: https://youtu.be/QQD3yx-JF2E
In my eyes, it's a gray area of questionable ethics, at least in the case of copies, a bit like the various video game emulators, YouTube downloaders, fan servers for games and so on. In some cases you might end up ruining your life due to actual litigation, though. Probably not something I'd try to personally do, but common enough to raise an eyebrow, yet not spark outrage on my part.
> Let's take Slack and Discord for example - I don't know who was first but you can see similarities, however one is not a rip off another.
Is Discord and Slack similar? Not really, not that much. Slack and Mattermost or Rocket.Chat, though? They're quite alike, to the point where someone could take an issue with it, yet there's been no controversy about that: https://imgur.com/a/3n5ssQQ (random online screenshots)
Granted, they also diverge as time goes on, even if the target audience is very much the same.
> The case discussed here is that Tegon copied Linear's interface design (colors, icons, spacings, layout, widgets, etc) almost in a pixel perfect manner, they didn't even bother with introducing their own tweaks found through user feedback.
I wonder if we'll get a lot of litigation around things like that in the future, since companies really care about their branding. Back when half the web looked like Bootstrap, you didn't hear a lot about that, though. Companies most likely won't sue each other for using the same component libraries, whereas the actual UI/UX similarity is probably a scale of sorts, a wide area in the middle is probably just "doing whatever works and what people are used to".
I wonder what the closest copy to Jira is, that'd be like a speedrun at getting sued.