[nickysielicki]

I don't understand the ethical dilemma many of you are raising.

I've never believed there's such a thing as plagiarism of style, only things like algorithms and methodologies. If someone makes a wierd looking chair, and I like it and make my own, and they try to tell me I'm stealing their ideas they can fuck off, especially if I'm not selling this chair but just using it for myself and helping others build their own chairs, too.

Style sheets are within these same bounds as far as I care. They're not intellectual property or content. There's nothing profound about aesthetics. No hard work in refining it. It's something that's composed entirely of intuition and trying to copyright that seems immoral to me. CSS is dressing, not content, and dressing is the only thing they have stolen from trello.

[nhayden]

The case for infringement would be very weak to non-existent if they recreated the look and feel writing the CSS themselves from scratch. The issue is they took the original product and modified some spacing and other minor details and redistributed it. Any written work like this is copyrightable.

[nickysielicki]

You're forgetting that they wrote the entire backend as a part of this.

[bdcravens]

Quickly reading through the code, it looks like the frontend is the bulk of the code. Which makes sense: Trello is really a pretty simple app; the UI experience is where the real magic is.

[bbcbasic]

Could even be done as a couchapp.