MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements In Mockups 159
CWmike writes "Canadian interface design firm MetaLab has accused Mozilla of stealing user interface elements for a development tool in the browser maker's Jetpack project, which aims to simplify add-on making. MetaLab leveled the charges on Tuesday when the 11-person firm's founder, Andrew Wilkinson, blogged about the similarities between his company's designs and those posted by Mozilla for FlightDeck, a Jetpack editor. 'What they did was pretty ridiculous,' Wilkinson said on Thursday. 'There's a difference between inspiration versus ripping something off,' he said. 'The measurements of the graphic elements [Mozilla took from us] were the exact same, the very same pixels. When someone takes your images from the server hosting them, that's crossing the line.' Mozilla apologized to MetaLab on Wednesday, saying in a blog post, 'While the design direction being implemented does not utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early mockups in our blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for the Jetpack SDK ... We sincerely apologize to MetaLab for incorporating design elements from their web site in our early mockups and for posting them publicly without proper attribution.'" Alexander Limi of the Firefox User Experience Team points out that MetaLab has accepted the apology, too — worth bearing in mind.
As the title says, it was only a mockup (Score:5, Informative)
The summary alludes to this, but just in case (since 90% of people who comment probably won't read past the headline):
Re:Open source, steal? (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. The worst part was how the KDE team went FORWARD in time, completely ripped off Windows 7 and then went BACK in time and implemented KDE4 before Windows 7 was even in beta! The nerve!
(Anonymous for obvious reasons)
Changed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As the title says, it was only a mockup (Score:5, Informative)
Note that the headline says just that:
MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements in Mockups (emphasis mine)
Re:This was a mockup people (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Mozilla reject their bid proposal, where Metalabs could've earned $XXX for their labor, but went ahead and used their design for their own purposes, regardless if it's just a mockup. It's like if you told potential investors or your great new gadget, and in good faith did not make them sign a NDA (those are so pretentious unless you're *both* very big companies), rejected your idea, but went ahead and placed an RFP, or beta test, or whatever using your idea as a skeleton.
Even something small as a bid proposal takes time and money to put together: from programmers, to art & design guys, to marketing, and sales.
Re:Open source, steal? (Score:3, Informative)
Without stealing of ideas, we wouldn't have Open Office which implemented feature-for-feature what Microsoft Office has. Without stealing, we wouldn't have KDE and Gnome with implemented many features from Windows and OS X. How could open source survive without it? :)
Feeling trolly today?
Both Apple and Microsoft copied from Xerox, Lotus etc.
The difference is that, when a FOSS copies from something else, it does not have the chutzpah to claim originality.
Re:Good thing. (Score:5, Informative)
1) Extensions created with Jetpack (the actual framework, not the prototype based on ideas from Ubiquity) have to a large extent the same powers as an old-style extension. There is a certain number of capabilities provided, but if you need more, you can write your own capabilities, share them, or indeed use others users shared capabilities.
2) As an official Jetpack Ambassador, and Ubiquity core developer (as previously mentioned, the base of some of the ideas for Jetpack), I can honestly say that I have never heard talks about ditching regular extensions, except from user-comments on sites like Slashdot. Indeed, many of us involved with the project have addressed this issue on several occasions.
3) The idea was never for "normal people" to make extensions, it was to widen the audience from a very few XUL developers (I believe the number is in the low end of 4-5000), to web-developers in general.
There are several interesting possibilities with this, amongst them companies using existing web developers in their employment to create work-flow enhancing extensions quickly, and letting website developers create new ways of interacting with their site. Especially in the latter case, the extensive security model in Jetpack compared with old-style extensions, and the ease of install/uninstall is paramount.
Best regards,
-- cers / Christian Sonne
Re:Open source, steal? (Score:2, Informative)
If we lump patents with copyrights, that was also the time when people who invented great stuff tended to die in poverty after the entire western world "stole their imaginary property" (a.k.a. "was inspired by their ideas"):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Crompton