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.
Re:Open source, steal? (Score:2, Interesting)
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? :)
Microsoft Word is the standard in word processing, it was reasonable to get a half functional free equivalent for users who couldn't run MSWord, but mozilla is huge and quite capabable of creating their own designs, while the firm they stole from is much smaller and not a standard in any way.
Re:Hm.. its a mockup (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Open source, steal? (Score:5, Interesting)
You just need to search Slashdot, when the first screenshots of Windows 7 came out, many compared it to KDE4. Now everyone compares Seven to KDE4...which is unfair, as history shows otherwise. I doubt Aaron Seigo and related folks had inside views of Seven's development.
But as the parent implies, it seems defending KDE4 is a risky position here, I wonder why. Qt is free now, and KDE is as much of a windows clone as most window managers out there, with a taskbar and titlebars. Gnome is a windows clone too.
Re:Open source, steal? (Score:2, Interesting)
However, your remark about composers borrowing from each other is correct. Vivaldi borrowed extensively from Ruggieri and Corelli.
Slashvertisement much? (Score:2, Interesting)
I hadn't heard of MetaLab before. Now, I have.
Mission accomplished.
Re:Open source, steal? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a difference between being derivative and being an attempt at a 1:1 copy.
The problem with this is the metalab seem to be implying Mozilla ripped them off, they actually have no idea who it was (based on RTFA, not doing any additional research).
It seems that Metalab submitted a design for this project, but it is not the design that mozilla used. Mozilla went with a different design that was ripped off from Metalabs homepage. That might just mean someone else saw the same invite to tender that Metalab did and searched various design company websites until they found something half decent they could steal. This sort of stuff goes on all the time from half arsed designers who cannot be bothered to raise there game.
Mozilla still should have caught it earlier though, especially as they had received a tender from the same company.