"There is no valid way to rip off people’s designs and have it be ok." ~ @dhh
Adam Rifkin stashed this in 37signals
Stashed in: Steve Jobs, Design!, YCombinator, @jolieodell, Misattribution!
Jolie O'Dell's Venture Beat article Y Combinator startup caught stealing from 37signals quotes the dhh tweet in the title of this post.
Sure, it was unoriginal of Curebit to plagiarize its design from 37signals.
But we live in a world in which Steve Jobs declared "Good artists copy, great artists steal" ...
Wait, didn't Jobs steal that from Picasso or Stravinsky or T.S. Eliot?
Give all the background info post the tweet. IMHO this is not a big deal, certainly not big enough for all the exaggerated PR circus that it has generated.
Looking at the examples, Curebit basically did a "save as" (they were even serving original Highrise images from 37 signals' servers!). Not cool. This happened to my company as well and it feels terrible.
Stupid, but hardly a hanging offence. I rate this W for whatever.
More annoying to me was the revisionist history of 37signals, who were a respected design company that hired DHH as a contracter when they were playing around with base camp ... I dont trust articles that can't even get basic facts straight.
4:46 PM Jan 28 2012