> Taking an existing closed system and opening it is a pretty fundamental part of the hacker ethic. However, it must be done in good faith and good taste.
1. OpenOffice.org says we don't like MS. How about we clone Office and annoy the fuck out of them?
2. Or MS is making too much money. Let's clone Office and give it up for free. We won't be making any money, but neither would they.
3. Or we are bored the fuck out of our minds. Let's build something - how about Office?
4. Or we are concerned MS's monopolistic policies and binary formats are needlessly tying in users to their platform. We will build something which looks and acts like Office without tying in the user to our product.
These and bazillion of other reasons are equally valid, and you or someone else doesn't have the authority to declare them invalid.
> Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice.
May be this isn't nice. Freedom isn't really freedom if it covers only things you find nice. I would happily trade nice with freedom to independently reproduce something.
> I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.
I really hope he doesn't take down the repo or the site. But if he is bullied into taking it down, even though he wrote the css, ruby, js code for the site, and didn't copy anything from svbtle, I think I will recreate the project. I don't care much about svbtle, but I do care about the freedom to reproduce it if I want it.
As far as design similarities go, it might or might not be copyright infringement - I am not knowledgeable enough to comment. If it is, he can tweak the design a bit to make it look inspired, instead of copied. As already said, if I independently implement a dock for linux(already done; just an example) which looks like Mac's, it's not theft and Apple can suck it if it thinks otherwise.
1. OpenOffice.org says we don't like MS. How about we clone Office and annoy the fuck out of them?
2. Or MS is making too much money. Let's clone Office and give it up for free. We won't be making any money, but neither would they.
3. Or we are bored the fuck out of our minds. Let's build something - how about Office?
4. Or we are concerned MS's monopolistic policies and binary formats are needlessly tying in users to their platform. We will build something which looks and acts like Office without tying in the user to our product.
These and bazillion of other reasons are equally valid, and you or someone else doesn't have the authority to declare them invalid.
> Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice.
May be this isn't nice. Freedom isn't really freedom if it covers only things you find nice. I would happily trade nice with freedom to independently reproduce something.
> I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.
I really hope he doesn't take down the repo or the site. But if he is bullied into taking it down, even though he wrote the css, ruby, js code for the site, and didn't copy anything from svbtle, I think I will recreate the project. I don't care much about svbtle, but I do care about the freedom to reproduce it if I want it.
As far as design similarities go, it might or might not be copyright infringement - I am not knowledgeable enough to comment. If it is, he can tweak the design a bit to make it look inspired, instead of copied. As already said, if I independently implement a dock for linux(already done; just an example) which looks like Mac's, it's not theft and Apple can suck it if it thinks otherwise.