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