Any semi-competent programmer can reproduce it within a day or two(the OP did it in a shorter span of time). That won't help, and you aren't entitled to what you think you are.

And the work is totally his. The design was too similar, but still, its his work. He didn't steal your css or images, and though you might feel rough about it, it doesn't make it theft as you are putting it again and again.

> Just wait until Svbtle is finished and open to the public. The reason it's closed is really simple: it's not ready yet.

Great for people who want to blog on Svbtle. If I don't and I like the idea, I am going to implement it and use it. I am glad we don't live in a world where you or anyone else can stop me from doing it.

The hard part was coming up with the original concept and design - kudos to you for the great work. Reproducing it is easy, and I don't think you have any right to stop me from doing it.

As another commenter pointed out, we don't actually want a world where Apple says MS stole its windows.

I realize this is not the mainstream HN view. Accepted wisdom says if you can copy something, than you may copy it. But I just don't get it. If you value someone's work, I think you owe them some form of compensation.

There's a line I read on 1001 Rules For My Unborn Son, "If a street performer makes you stop walking, you owe him a buck." I tend to agree with this, both literally and metaphorically.

I agree that good ideas shouldn't be trapped or left to wither in isolation when they could benefit society at large. I just think this has to be tempered with some form of compensation to the person who introduced the idea.

But I'm open to being convinced otherwise if anyone has a good argument to the contrary.

I am quoting this example for the second time. MS made Office common place. It doesn't mean OpenOffice.org owed MS anything, other than "hey neat". As long as it's not infringement recognized by law, no body owes anyone anything.

> if you can copy something, than you may copy it.

"can copy" is hard, may be a little less hard than the first implementation, but it's still hard work. You don't get exclusivity by getting there first. In the cases in which you do get it viz. software patents, it creates more problems than it solves. So yes, I am pretty much in line with "if you can copy it, you may".

> If you value someone's work, I think you owe them some form of compensation.

It's entirely possible to value someone's work, but not agree with his exclusivity requirements.

> I agree that good ideas shouldn't be trapped or left to wither in isolation when they could benefit society at large. I just think this has to be tempered with some form of compensation to the person who introduced the idea.

And I think "I was here first so you all are prosecuting me by not going somewhere else and trying to get here" is a prefect way to let good ideas wither and die. More importantly, this sense of exclusivity and entitlement is misplaced.

If something is inevitable or trivial (slide to unlock, one-click checkout), I don't think there should be any protection at all.

But the more original something is, the more the creator has actually added to society by creating it. And yes, copying it can add to society as well by making it universal, but I think some kind of monetary incentive is a great way to get people to work on original ideas.

Would Apple be so creative if they weren't so profitable? Isn't it their profitability which gives them the ability to spend time and money on R&D? If you take away the profit, don't you take away the opportunity to do R&D?

I think this is why patents were introduced in the first place. I don't think patents work for software, but I think the idea is the same. For the greatest good for society, we want lots and lots of universally applied creative ideas. But there's a trade-off between encouraging new ideas and encouraging mass distribution of ideas. "IP" laws encourage new ideas but discourage sharing. "Piracy" encourages sharing but discourages new ideas.

I just think that there needs to be a balance, and that "thanks for doing the hard work, I'll take it from here" isn't it.

EDIT: I would appreciate an explanation of why people feel I am not contributing.

If Apple's profit equates to Android not doing what they are doing, Apple going bankrupt will be a fair trade in my book. If Apple comes up with something original, which Android re-implements, it doesn't owe Apple anything, even if it affects Apple's profits. Apple working on original things and being in business is good, but not so much that others' ability to re-implement things be taken away.

Android has different hardware, a different OS, a different programming language for development, etc.

At the most precise level, copying music creates and absolutely perfect copy. There is literally no difference between the original file and the new one.

Would it be fair for someone to make an exact copy of an iPhone, running an exact copy of iOS and then distribute it?

I think the precision of the copy has a great deal to do with whether it's OK or not, which I think is what Dustin was getting at when he said it's OK to steal his ideas but not his implementation.

Maybe he doesn't get to draw the line wherever he likes, but it seems there ought to be a line somewhere.

I would never repaint van Gogh, because I'd rather paint my own things. On the other hand, if I were to want a Thomas Kincade painting (for some ghastly reason), I'd definitely buy the cheapest reproduction I could find, because the original painting just wasn't that valuable to begin with.

If I were a painter, I would paint me the hell out of some van Gogh. In every skill I've practiced seeing what the masters do, reproducing it (especially figuring out _why_ they did it that way) has been a very useful learning technique.

More to the point of your post, and this story: Would I sell my van Gogh copies? Probably not. Not because I think there's something terribly wrong about it. Mostly because they'd still be inferior to the original.

I would certainly give them away to friends who wanted to hang it in their den or library, though.

Unfortunately, you picked a bad example: a painting is a finite resource -- there is only one physical painting painted by the original artist. A painting cannot be "copied" with the same veracity as software can be (bitwise, which in the case of software becomes piracy) and any attempt to pass a "copy" of a painting as an original is forgery.

Classifying any work (art/software) as a rip-off requires defining the very fine line between fair-use and unfair forgery. When it comes to artistic endeavors (as in "design"), you'll have more luck defining the position and velocity of an electron around a nucleus than delineating that fair/unfair boundary.

As to writing it.. you made a fairly big splashy announcement about this great new concept in blogging, and then made it invitation only. That's guaranteed to get push back from the community, especially one that considers ideas only good for execution!

It seems fairly simple to implement - you might claim some moral ownership of the concept, but that probably won't hold up well, either, in this community.

This is community that lives on the maxim of "release early and iterate", we're not always looking for a slick finished product. So now you have competition; may the best product win!

(It may seem cruel, Dustin, but you do have an attitude - and that seems to have grated on people. So, maybe this gives you an experience of the same feeling. Just saying.)

EDIT: Dustin's edited response is interesting; as a programmer I probably don't set as much store by the elements of design as he (naturally) does - simple things don't represent a creative element, to me in the same way. Which is interesting food for thought.

Hopefully Nate will continue to move his design away from Dustin's

I think you've captured the essence of why some HN readers think Dustin had this coming, so to speak. The act of making the system exclusive is abrasive to so many hackers, where information is free to all, and the modifiers of this information are those with the recognizable merit to affect it. Dustin released his project in a Bizarro world version of the open source process, where information is chained and those granted access are selected in private, with no transparency of the criteria.

In fact, I would say Dustin did have it coming. That's what open source tends to do, like it or not. You only have to look back at the most popular proprietary systems of note to see that hackers love to imitate these products, if not downright replace them. Unix? Linux. Microsoft Office? LibreOffice. TiVo? MythTv. Hell, there's even a SimCity imitation called LinCity! The jackals, as Nolan Bushnell called them, are out in force--and if you haven't noticed, that's the way things have been for the last 30 years. It was inevitable that Svbtle would be "liberated". What's actually amazing is that this time it only took ten hours.

Now, if I were Dustin, I would likely be offended that my code had been reverse-engineered so closely. If I presented my code with the attitude that it is better than sliced bread, yeah, I would definitely feel wronged by my design being copied. I can sympathize with that. But I can't sympathize with the bubble in which Svbtle was presented. It came off as pretentious. There's no room for that in this day and age. And I'm not saying that Dustin Curtis deserved to have his design imitated because he was pretentious, oh no. I'm saying that he should not be so surprised that it happened. Curtis's attitude led to an imitation surfacing in such short time. Dustin's attitude affected Nate on an emotional level--and that's what brings out the jackal in open source hackers.

I agree with your third paragraph; I sympathise with Dustin's viewpoint (though I don't entirely agree with it). I don't think he deserved the imitation, but his approach pretty much guaranteed it.

But I can't bring myself to criticise Nate either, because, as you say, he followed the typical hacker ethics - which is that if something good isn't accessible, make it so. I like that social structure; it adds competition and forces products to be the very best they can. It avoids the situation where one person can control an idea by virtue of being the first mover.

Nate misfired by being similar to the original design, I for one (and I can understand Dustin feeling differently) can forgive that mistake partly as a "hacked together in a night" job and partly because the design elements (only in my opinion) are not revolutionary. Provided he works to fix that issue (some of which he has done) then I see no problem.

I was thinking about this over coffee... I am sure that a lot of thought and effort went into Svbtle and its design; both thought and coding (no idea how much of a coder Dustin is). It's tempting to see Nate's work as hurried and with less value - but he put his skill as a coder into cloning it in a night, and he seems to want to pursue the idea further. Many of the best projects in the world started as hacked up examples, clones or tests. And, again, I am a sucker for "released early, accepting patches" :)

Which is why, morally, I'm with Nate - because his whole approach seems "nicer" than Dustin's. If this platform goes the distance, who would I want to see at the helm? Perhaps the wrong measure, but I'm only human :)

That strongly implies the free version will be not-good, because there are many more ways to be not-good than to be different-good.

Basic layout? Also the color scheme, font hierarchy, whitespace around elements (which is a critical portion of the design), and basically every trick dcurtis used to draw the eye and maintain the mental flow of the app.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/byword/id420212497?mt=12&...

http://textroom.sourceforge.net/images/odtexport1.png

The fonts are not the same the relative font sizes are a bit different (Dustin's has bigger text).

With that said; you are right about font/colors (I hadn't noticed).

I give credit to Nate for taking steps to address those similarities following feedback, and I hope he goes further with that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...

I think you should calm down, take a deep breath, accept the compliment, and see how you can work together. It sounds like he'd be happy to help you make it 'ready' faster.

A few days ago, when it was posted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672526), the comments were largely positive.

I'm not saying that nwienert is necessarily right or wrong, but it's strange that this post received such a strong reaction compared to the Font Awesome post.

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

I'm not sure where the idea comes from that when someone displays displeasure with something, they want it to be illegal. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's good.Just because it's not good doesn't mean it should be illegal.

However, to get such a patent the design must clearly be novel. Really, really novel. My uncle happens to be a patent lawyer a.d. who fought a lot of cases about product design for a big telco in the European patents court in his time. Knowing a few of his cases, I strongly doubt dcurtis design would be eligible for a design patent in Europe.

The blog itself (it's functionality) would fail an attempt to patented for similar reasons. Apart from that, yes there is copyright everywhere but where this starts in cases like the one at hand is a gray area at best.

[1] http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/treaties/en/ip/berne/pd...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity (in US copyright law)

[3] http://norcal.gag.org/legalities/2004/legalities_no03.html (first question)

I guess my point was that all that doesn't matter if the original design doesn't exhibit enough originality (I used the term 'novel').

To give an example: if I have an A4 page with left aligned text, that looks very similar to any other A4 page with left aligned text that happens to use the same font size and line height.

In the case at hand, the design wasn't even dcurtis', he presumably took it from http://drawar.com/ Or maybe not?

With a design so simple, similarity by coincidence can't be ruled out. I wouldn't be surprised if another dozen websites existed that exhibited a /very/ similar design.

Also it was FAR from a pixel-for-pixel exact duplication. Spacing around the site is still different, as is the font and font sizing.

I think you should realize you overreacted a bit. It was simply an experiment and a way to give back to the community.

these discussions only happen for it products. can't see mr. porsche complaining about enzo ferrari (when still alive... yea. those were the days!).

http://briefmobile.com/images/articles/galaxy-s-vs-iphone.jp...

You are on the left.

My blog has a similar minimal design and its just a stock Tubmlr one.

drewblaisdell said (to Dustin):

> How different would you say his parody of your site is than your site is of http://drawar.com/ ?

I said I don't see how Svbtle is a copy of drawar.com:

> I don't see it; the whole workflow - draft to publish columns and such - is the same at drawar, or?

So I do not think that Svbtle is a rip-off of drawar.com.

Now if there's anything unique about Svbtle compared to the blogging systems I've personally used, its the draft thing (as explained in the Svbtle article we all read here on HN a few hours before this one).

My tumblr has drafts; but its not this trello-like list organising thing. As Dustin says, it helps make stories happen and posts get written.

Takes a lot to admit this, especially publicly. Hopefully if I find myself in a similar situation, I'll do the same thing, and in less than an hour after my initial reaction.

If HN had Kudos buttons, I'd hover my mouse over yours for a few seconds.

As I stated in my post, I'll be changing my personal design shortly.

This is not original. You copied my design work.

One is the visual design, and even the author agrees that it's probably too similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744356

The other is the idea/concept. Creating open-source versions of unique ideas is nothing new and I doubt you'll see much sympathy on this front.

Granted, latest incarnations of MS's products are a bit different with the (crappy) ribbon and all, but LO is quite similar to previous versions of Office.

And I'm talking both about UI, design and functionality. Think Excel/Calc functions, for example.

You should have confidence that you will win because you can implement it better, understand the need better, can craft better solutions faster, and have better content on your network. If those things aren't true and all you had was an idea, unfortunately this was bound to happen.

Ideas alone are not defensible, practically or even legally. Successful implementations thereof can be however.

Thanks for totally muddying the water, crossing the line, breaking an unwritten rule and not being a "team player".

You quite simply suck.

Maybe if he just took the idea, with the ideas/published and simplified writing screen, he may have a case, but this is clearly stealing the design.

(2) It's pretty confirmed that a lot of our intuitions regarding "theft" require us to see "profit" as a component -- and therefore we are much less likely to see theft in a general design that has been open-sourced. Maybe the clearest way to see this is BSD's libedit, which replicates the GNU Readline library so that you can use it without selling your soul to Stallman. It's an idea rip-off, but it serves a very important charitable function. Startups trying to push product just seem more skeevy.

(3) It is also harder to see something as "theft" if it seems too simple. Nate said, "I whipped open terminal, typed in rails new obtvse, and a few hours later I'm here." That's pretty lightweight, if you're creating a fresh copy from an idea someone gave you.

Edit: (4) Also it's often harder to consider something theft when you cite your sources and say, "okay, this idea comes straight from X, who is awesome -- all credit to them please."

2. I disagree, he's directly taken the fruits of someone elses' labour and given them away without permission. Copying the functionality and idea, I'm fine with, but he didn't "remake" the design like he did the functionality, he just remade the scripting aspect of it. The benefits you mention are functional benefits, and these could have been brought to the public without the near pixel perfect design.

3. I somewhat agree, however I could remake the design of any website without copying and pasting in a short time. It would take a short time because all the time that was spent designing it has been done by someone else.

4. Maybe slightly, but he took what someone else had produced without permission, at best this is a slightly scummy thing to do. He tweeted Dustin to let him know that he had done it, he could have just as easily asked. If Dustin had refused then he'd be free to make something which fulfils the same function, but isn't a clone.

For the record, I'm not sure exactly where I stand regarding IP, but I'm not talking from a legal perspective, just an ethical one, and I don't think this is ethical nor HN's praise of it.

I live in China, a country mocked for its cloning. If the Chinese had hand written the GroupOn site, for example, rather than copy/pasting it, most people who still think it's low. It seems to me more that people think that a) Dustin is a bit of a dick and b) open sourcing something means you can do whatever you like because it's for the good of humanity.

You have a social/emotional complaint: someone took your good idea (and kudos to you: it's a great idea!), and duplicated it. But it's recognized (and documented here) that you were the progenitor of the idea, and if you eventually open source the original, I can't see how this will "hurt" you. People have an innate sense of fairness, and duplicating ideas like this goes against it in a small way.

But it's not theft (or even copyright infringement), and by overreacting you are going to alienate people who would otherwise be sympathetic.

No, never, as long as the open-source alternative doesn't actually copy any copyrightable material from the original (such as images or other data). And I don't see any signs of that here.

On the contrary, creating an open-source alternative to closed-source software is considered awesome.

Not under any definition of "theft" in use outside IP troll offices, as far as I know.

Feel for you here dcurtis, and surprised people are actually behind this.

Plus, your value is not the app, it's the people in the network, so stay calm and let us not-so-cool people use the open-source clone.

In fact, you could assume the opposite: that, because he is a professional designer, it took him less time to design the app than it would've taken a "layman". (I'm not forgetting about the perfectionism of many designers, mind you)

You can't go around putting the Coke label on different fizzy beverages.

Svbtle is obviously popular for its brand. You are stealing its brand and using it for unintended purposes. The only value in what you've created is that it looks like Dustin's work.

Ripping that off wholesale diminishes the value of something Dustin work(ed/s) very hard to create and curate. Thousands of decisions went into that design. The design is a mark of quality.

Show some respect.

2. Brand? What brand? It's a blogging platform. People don't want it because of a brand. They want it because it's a good idea (simplistic blogging).

3. Coke has a trademarked label. This is merely a website. What is dustin going to trademark/copyright? The ratio of whitespace to small, grey lines?

Design is a fundamental part of the product - no body is contesting it. Personally I am taking exception to your exclusivity expectations. I have given it a lot of thought, and I believe the current optimum is he can rip off your design and only thing you can do about it is feel outraged. The alternative is scary - if this sort of exclusivity requirements are enforced, Apple would shutdown MS over supposedly copying windows and Android over copying "swipe to unlock".

> Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning.

That's how free market works.

> Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just don't copy my implementation or designs.

I can choose to play nice, or I can rip you off wholesale. As long as I am within the realms of law, it's fair game. You might not like it, but it's better than the alternatives where you can dictate what I can and can not do just because you did something first.

Does that mean it will be open to _anyone_ and no longer only to people considered to be "intelligent, creative, and witty"?

Not only that, but I saw the original, and it wasn't.

You have inverted the moral terrain, and you are now going to have to defend your own credibility / honesty when you are leveling those same accusations at someone else.

I don't understand how reusing/copying something finely done reduce its sacredness/sanctity.

Perhaps svbtle's invite-only status made people feel like outsiders, perhaps something you've done in the past rubbed someone the wrong way - either way, I suspect the personal dislike comes first and the justification for the action comes second. If the design of a much-beloved figure here was stolen, I suspect the reaction and the arguments in the thread would be very different.

Stanley Fish wrote an interesting opinion piece recently about this impulse, applied to politics:

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/two-cheers...

If you open source your version, this will not detract from it. And if you don't, then this gives folks something to use.

To see the HN community defending this is really sad.

Dustin himself had asked people not to copy his work and that he was releasing it publicly:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742596

It's bullshit like this that discourages good ideas from being shared.