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Comment by ankurfedora | Hacker News Reader

Felix,

I'm the founder of http://usefedora.com -- a product you are intimately familiar with.

Love the effort and open source contribution -- but definitely put off by stealing our UI/UX almost verbatim (example site built with our tool: http://bitfountain.io/courses/iwatch-course <-- the same people as your case study, your tool: http://www.onedayrails.com/)

While it is incredibly flattering for a small startup like ours to have an open-source derivative, stealing our interface and design patterns for a project that you charge hundreds of dollars in installation fees definitely leaves a bad taste.

Do it right and we'd have probably helped you promote it. But this just doesn't seem cool.

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I didn't realize you owned the exclusive use of the large leaderboard images and rounded buttons design patterns. I'm sure there are loads of people out there profiting off of your patented design that you should probably be harassing as well.

Good thing http://getbootstrap.com/ looks nothing at all like "your" design.

The obvious similarities are throughout the design, including the entirety of the course sales pages, the lecture view, specific iconography, etc.

Both sites just look like a customized bootstrap theme to me

What exactly is he stealing? Big picture at the top followed by some text/testimonials? That's like every second modern landing page these days.

Looks like it goes deeper than that considering his onedayrails.com landing page is the same design, sequence and structure as the default Fedora landing page as well as the internal lessons experience and design

Hi Ankur,

I very much didn't intend to offend you, copy you or cause you to be upset.

That homepage design is based on what Udemy looked like before their update and that's why I felt okay to use it as a starting point.

That said, I'll update the homepage for the course today with a new design as a gesture of good faith.

I think the platform itself, not the homepage/sales page is what the people using coursify like. I suspect many of them won't even use that homepage. It's just a starting point.

Again I'm trying to make friends not enemies. Hope I didn't offend you.

Felix

Happy Easter.

Thank you, appreciate the response and the new design.

Keep me updated with future developments (ankur@usefedora.com) and maybe we can work together in the future.

Hopefully we can.

I'll let you know when the new design is up. I've already coded most of it.

I second Ankur's thoughts here. We've put a lot of time and energy into making our user experience simple and beautiful and while we take it as a compliment that you liked it enough to use our design, we would appreciate it if you came up with your own original design as to differentiate from us.

We're not just a random online education platform that popped up out of the blue - we're real people working very hard to build a quality product.

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