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by huhtenberg 4172 days ago
Even setting aside the legality of this rip, doesn't the ethical aspects of it bother anyone as well?

Designing a simple and functional UI is really hard. It takes ages to sift through possible options, discard the fluff, iterate over the details and while the end result is endearingly simple, it ends up fronting a shitload of sweat and tears. And then someone just waltzes in waving their Libre flag and the middle finger to lift the whole thing just as if it's a no big deal. I don't know about you, but this really pisses me off. This is as disrespectful as it gets towards people who did the original work and it also reflects really poorly on the O/S in general.
3 comments
mindcrime 4172 days ago
"Good artists borrow, great artists steal".

That said, yeah, I have a problem with stealing actual source code, even if it is "just" CSS and HTML or whatever. But as far as cribbing the "look and feel" stuff, I personally don't have a problem with it. And to the extent that I know anything about the legal aspects, I thought there was some old case involving Lotus or Adobe or somebody, that established that copying "look and feel" is legal?

Edit: Here's more on the legal aspect:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel#Lawsuits_over

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markdown 4172 days ago
If you want to see a completely original UI with not a single thing "borrowed" from elsewhere, my 5yr old has some drawings to show you.

This specific case takes it too far, there's no doubt about that. But you can be sure that the Trello designer was heavily influenced by those that came before him. UI designers spend half their time looking at UI's designed by others to see what works and what doesn't.

In fact, more often than not, UI design should be copied. You don't design a completely different light switch just because you want to be original. Function before form.

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huhtenberg 4172 days ago
Of course the cross-pollination is required. But this LibreTrello thing is a blatant rip - the look and feel, the semantics and interaction flows, all the details. Everything, to the dot.

It's still would've been not a big deal if it were just a temporary placeholder design and it got released to the public accidentally. Gotta start somewhere, that's understandable. But they act entitled to what they did. This is what the problem is. They don't recognize or acknowledge all the work that Trello devs did to get things where they are. And they did a lot of it, which is plainly obvious from the fact that there was no other Trello before them.

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streptomycin 4172 days ago
That doesn't bother me. You could make a similar argument about some aspect of nearly every piece of open source software. Web design isn't special. What about C# vs Mono, Matlab vs Octave, Unix vs GNU/Linux, etc.?

(Just to be clear... directly copying assets and code is not cool.)

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