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MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements In Mockups

Posted by timothy on from the classic-miscommunication dept.

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.

28 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Open source, steal? by nacturation · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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? :)

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    1. Re:Open source, steal? by The+Turd+Burglar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How could open source survive without it? :)

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

    2. Re:Open source, steal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Without stealing, we wouldn't have KDE and Gnome with implemented many features from Windows and OS X.

      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)

    3. Re:Open source, steal? by The+End+Of+Days · · Score: 5, Funny

      (Anonymous for obvious reasons)

      Yeah, defending KDE on Slashdot is very risky.

    4. Re:Open source, steal? by digitalchinky · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Open source, steal? by gzipped_tar · · Score: 4, Funny

      They've been keeping it in an amusement part since the UN's victory over the Nazis led by Charlie Chaplin. BTW, Godwined.

      --
      Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
    6. Re:Open source, steal? by Fluffeh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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    7. Re:Open source, steal? by PitaBred · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      --
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    8. Re:Open source, steal? by Windwraith · · 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.

    9. Re:Open source, steal? by The+Turd+Burglar · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    10. Re:Open source, steal? by indiechild · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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".

    11. Re:Open source, steal? by paeanblack · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      I disagree.

      Cheers,
      --e^x

    12. Re:Open source, steal? by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      --
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    13. Re:Open source, steal? by realityimpaired · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. Snore by some_guy_88 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Company does something wrong.

    Company apologizes.

    Accuser accepts apology.

    Slow news day?

    1. Re:Snore by gzipped_tar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
  3. As the title says, it was only a mockup by R.Mo_Robert · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary alludes to this, but just in case (since 90% of people who comment probably won't read past the headline):

    Update: I just got off the phone with the team at Mozilla, who apologized and clarified a few things. The design which used our site’s design elements was a development build and according to them the design has been changed in newer builds. That said, it was used in their launch video as well as their blog post announcing the product. They told me that that the team who put together the blog post and video was unaware of the similarities at the time of inclusion. We’ve asked for a public apology, and I’ll be doing a follow-up post tomorrow [and they did].

    --
    R.Mo
    1. Re:As the title says, it was only a mockup by X0563511 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Note that the headline says just that:

      MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements in Mockups (emphasis mine)

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    2. Re:As the title says, it was only a mockup by Culture20 · · Score: 4, Funny

      LAUNCELOT: Look, my liege!
      ARTHUR: Camelot!
      GALAHAD: Camelot!
      LAUNCELOT: Camelot!
      PATSY: It's only a model.

  4. This was a mockup people by OnlyJedi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:This was a mockup people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:This was a mockup people by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  5. Good thing. by Ekuryua · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Good thing. by FreakCERS · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm sorry, but most of your assertions are blatantly untrue.

      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

  6. Changed by Kohenkatz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here is what it looks like now: http://gallery.ymkatz.net/mozilla%20jetpack.png

  7. Re:Under 30, are you? by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess you forgot Harvard Graphics :-)

  8. Re:Hm.. its a mockup by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They did (privately) report it to Mozilla first. The blog went up after Mozilla ignored them. Mozilla could have handled it privately if they were concerned. It's obvious Mozilla only apologized because they were receiving negative attention, not because they think there was a problem.

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  9. reverse the situation by timmarhy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    stop and think of the comments if the situation was reversed.

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

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