| At what point does this become unacceptable? Look at what Zynga did with FarmVille. At first, it was exactly like FarmTown. Same appearance, same menu layout, same gameplay. They weren't actually serving assets from FarmTown's servers, but besides that, the design was exactly the same. Was this illegal? Probably not - design like this generally can't be copyrighted. Was this successful? Yes - this sort of strategy led Zynga to be worth billions of dollars. Was this ethical? I think intelligent people will differ. Either way, DHH certainly uses his audience to attack people who come too close to the design of 37signals. A similar thing happened when Google launched Huddle, and DHH complained it was too similar to Campfire. In the end, Google rebranded it as a PR move and nobody cared any more. Whether it's ethical or not, it certainly seems like a tactical PR mistake for a startup to annoy DHH this much. |