MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements In Mockups

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.

Comments

Open source, steal?

[nacturation]

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? :)

Re:Open source, steal?

[The Turd Burglar]

How could open source survive without it? :)

Coming up with your own ideas instead of cloning everyone else's?

Re:Open source, steal?

[commodore64_love]

Without stealing, we wouldn't have many works of Shakespeare or Bach, both of whom copied liberally from their Italian counterparts. (Of course that was before copyright existed, hence plagiarism of ideas was not only legal, but accepted.)

Re:Open source, steal?

[digitalchinky]

Feature for Feature you say? Staroffice started life as "StarWriter" way back when 8 bit processors were cutting edge. I'd say there was and still is quite a lot of 'feature' copying happening on all sides. Probably a lot of what you think of as copying is just common sense GUI design, some of it accidental, but either way, someone has to write the code, it's not like Microsoft released the source.

Re:Open source, steal?

[Fluffeh]

How could open source survive without it? :)

Coming up with your own ideas instead of cloning everyone else's?

That depends on what your open source project is. If you want to replace a current application with an open source one, coming up with your own ideas of how to implement it won't be the best option. If I wanted my company to replace their versions of Microsoft Word with an open source word processor, I would want the application to reliably and hopefully in a simple way do all that Microsoft Word currently does. There is no point in making a word processor if it's so different and can do all these other things if it can't do the things I need it to do.

Coming up with ideas has nothing to do with open/prop source.

When making something new, to look into a market/niche that isn't being catered for currently, come up with new ideas, do things that no-one has done already. Be creative. When trying to take a market from someone else or to replace a product, copy the functionality features - but even at that point, it would be better to look at how those functions and features might be improved in the process. Giving someone a product that does exactly the same thing won't give them any incentive at all to change. Giving them a product that does the same things, but better/simpler/easier/quicker is when you will have a product worth swapping to.

Re:Open source, steal?

[PitaBred]

That's impossible. You can't live in a vacuum, and EVERYTHING is derivative to one degree or another.

Re:Open source, steal?

[The Turd Burglar]

There's a difference between being derivative and being an attempt at a 1:1 copy.

Re:Open source, steal?

[indiechild]

The same old tired excuse -- did you even look at the article and linked blog entry? This isn't about stealing of ideas, this is stealing work pixel-for-pixel. That's never OK, and has nothing to do with open source or "artistic inspiration".

Re:Open source, steal?

[hairyfeet]

Oh please! Can we let this old 'for the starving (insert authors/inventors/artists) bullshit just DIAF already? Sure that was true back when copyrights were first invented, you know when they were actually SANE, but that time has been gone for decades now. All copyrights and patents do know is crush the little guy who can't compete with supermegacorp who has a patent warchest or pile of copyrights the size of the great pyramids.

You want proof? One sentence-Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright. Than man has been dead since before cars had seatbelts, yet one of his first works, made when planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, is STILL under copyrights! This gross abuse of power is why innovation in this country (with the exception of laws and ponzi schemes) is pretty much dead, as the only way to survive the patent trolls and other leeches is to sell out to some multinational who will give you pennies while they rake in the truckloads of cash.

So please, just put down the Ayn Rand and smell the fail, okay? All this "IP" crap has done is give supermegacorps like Disney enough cash to buy out every politician on the planet, while making sure the little guy doesn't have a chance in hell. it is like all this stupidity of record companies suing each other because one of their bands made a song that sounds like something already in their catalog. Well duh! There are only 12 notes in the western scale, and thanks to copyrights being "forever minus a single day" now the odds of find 4 or 5 chords that don't grate on your ears that someone else hadn't ever played before is pretty much zilch. Or should we stop all artists from recording now because it may infringe on some supermegacorp's back catalog?

Re:Open source, steal?

[realityimpaired]

Why reinvent the wheel? If there's a particular design/UI element that's in use, has been updated and refined for decades, and is generally accepted as the easiest or most efficient, or even just the most familiar way to do things, why reinvent it? If you eschew it completely, you're likely to alienate a significant portion of your user base.

Snore

[some_guy_88]

Company does something wrong.

Company apologizes.

Accuser accepts apology.

Slow news day?

Re:Snore

[gzipped_tar]

Considering this is slashdot (and timothy), a story that is not openly aiming at generating hate, flame & modtroll fest is indeed, well, quite a story.

This was a mockup people

[OnlyJedi]

So, a company decided to take shortcuts in creating a mockup of a project still in early development, and is being blasted because of it? Seriously, this was nowhere near a final release or even a beta release. It was a mockup, designed solely to get across an idea of what the final product interface would look like. Tasking an art team to create all-new icons and artwork is generally counter to the idea of the quick-and-dirty nature of mockups.

Re:This was a mockup people

[Anonymous Coward]

So, a company decided to take shortcuts in creating a mockup

No, they showed it to the public. Public demo trumps mockup, and they deserve a bit of flak for this one.

Good thing.

[Ekuryua]

Jetpack is pretty much an attempt at making firefox extensions greasemonkey scripts that hold no actual application power. They were talking of removing normal extension support for that fake sugary stuff. Plus the idea that normal people will be making quick extensions is just ridiculous. Making a normal ff extension is not that hard, it's all quite documented and you can take any simple extension as base template if scared...

Under 30, are you?

[xzvf]

Lotus 123, Visicalc, WordPerfect, ... I guess you can give MS PowerPoint.

Re:Under 30, are you?

[Saint Stephen]

I guess you forgot Harvard Graphics :-)

Re:Under 30, are you?

[jedidiah]

> My only beef is when people get all high and mighty about ideas being borrowed in the
> other direction. Who cares if Microsoft or Apple take ideas that started in the open
> source world. The end result is an improved user experience for all software.

No one cares about what Microsoft or Apple copies about until they make noises about "freedom to innovate" or start patent trolling.

They get flack for lying and hypocrisy, not theft.

reverse the situation

[timmarhy]

stop and think of the comments if the situation was reversed.

yes thats right, slashdot is as bad as fox news.

Re:reverse the situation

[onefriedrice]

stop and think of the comments if the situation was reversed.

yes thats right, slashdot is as bad as fox news.

More like people are just people. Our experiences give us bias, and there is nobody who can achieve perfect objectivity in every situation. People here have a propensity to cheer for open source software. Through their own experiences, Fox viewers have a different perspective. It's not bad, it's just life. The alternative would be to throw out all emotion and become as the Vulcans. Yes, we're all biased. Yes, we're all emotional. Yes, we're all hypocrites--especially those of us who pretend to have no bias.

Front page stuff: decent behaviour

[Odinlake]

X slights Y, apologizes. Y accepts apology. Isn't it a rather depressing thought that this kind of upright behaviour apparently is unusual enough that it makes news?