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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.
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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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.
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