Don’t Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging:
Don’t Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging
As the dust is settling from the Svbtle vs Obtvse debacle, I’m left feeling a little discouraged. The reason I feel this way is because a consensus had been made between part of the community that communicates: “It’s okay to steal and duplicate an idea as long as you write your own code.” If you don’t already know the story, read the summary below and check out some of the discussion on Hacker News.
[What I find discouraging is the knee jerk reaction. in the end it’s just another blogging tool. As the proof that it is commodity item, for the most part, something extremely similar was written in no time. And even then, I don’t deny that subtleties matter, and that the thinking behind Svbtle changed the way the he thought about writing, it was just that. the technique, whether reinforced or not can be applied to many tools that are already out there. Don’t title, don’t publish seem like the core initial impulses. So with that in mind, why all the upset because this code wasn’t released? Yet another subtle bit. In the original post about it, there’s an implication that he was about to release it, and then he pulled it back in order to create an invitation only blogging network. So he pushed the buttons of a community that demands openness in code with this bit. If he was looking for attention, this might have worked, although I suspect it is more tempest in a teapot than viral explosion… in the end, the visual design similarity is troubling to me. It flies in the face of what he was trying to do in the end, which is create a network where the visual sues stand for quality. Making it hard to discern by making use of the design is what I find unfortunate here.]