N.B. It's "37signals", not "37 Signals". Impressively, the original VentureBeat headline actually gets this right.
YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
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Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#82At what point does inspiration become imitation? Clearly Curebit stepped over the line in this case, but it's undeniable that lots of startups draw design inspiration from other companies. But at what point does this become unacceptable? For example, if Curebit merely used the same design, except hosting the assets on their own server, would that be okay? What if they just copied the layout but used their own styles,…
If I was DHH I would have replaced the images with something else. It is always entertaining what you can do to someone's site if they are foolish enough to pull images off your server. Or they could have blocked the hotlinking of the image.
The images had explicit height/width set (and were small) so any damage from this would've been pretty limited.
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#83I think dhh just threw a lot of traffic at Curebit. Would be good to find out how many more users Curebit got today.
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#84Is the tweet war in the article real? Sounds way over the top for what is simply a landing page. I suppose they didn't make millions out of it. Kind of makes you sympathize with curebit (but a good opportunity to get to know them).
PS. the Rocket logo thing dhh is referring to is a stock image, i 've even used it myself! http://www.bigstockphoto.com/image-5418738/stock-vector-retr...
PS 2: Is dhh always so irritable?
PS 3: Reminds of the oatmeal vs funnyjunk situation, but much less civil http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk2
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#85OMG, that's really really stupid. (1) It's incredible stupid to just copy sites, (2) it's retarded to keep references to files hosted on other servers and (3) it's incredible retarded to tweet to dhh "chill dude", imo a huge lack of respect & social feeling.
YC has to look out, a few more of these stupid incidents and the YC brand will lose it's golden shine.. if you 're a 16 yo. kid you can make this "mistake", if your a YC company with $ 1.5 m in funding you can't imo.
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's one thing to complain that another company built a design largely influenced by yours. And that's a legitimate complaint, although the most you can do is say "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" This is wholesale ripping off (in particular, indicated by the direct linking to 37signals site assets). I would be pissed off too if I found that my bandwidth was being used to serve another company's site. Esp…
I still don't see how any of this validates such an immature response from the copied company. Don't they have a PR guy or something to shut them up before they say things they might regret?
> Don't they have a PR guy or something to shut them up before they say things they might regret?
Have you not heard of 37signals before this?
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#87My two cents: everyone is making this a big deal, and it isn't. 37signals is respected, and they do great work. For a startup trying to get funding, a few images and a layout goes a long way, especially if it's just a small team of devs with zero design experience, etc. Sure they shouldn't have copied, but sure I shouldn't have googled the answer to that coding problem I just spend 2 hours slamming my head against th…
They are not a 'normal' startup. With 1.2M, they can hire designer from Asia which probably cheaper rate compare to the state. Looking at the founder respond on twitter, He clearly have no idea about design and how web works.
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I was DHH I would have replaced the images with something else. It is always entertaining what you can do to someone's site if they are foolish enough to pull images off your server. Or they could have blocked the hotlinking of the image.
The images had explicit height/width set (and were small) so any damage from this would've been pretty limited.
True, but changing the little checks to little middle finger bullets would have been a much more elegant method of retaliation.
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#89This incident strikes me as a glaring example of how broken web design is. A simple page like that should be easier and faster to create from scratch using a WYSIWYG tool, and then publish to a web platform that support it.... than copying the source and then editing it in a text editor. I know in the past such WYSIWYG tools were too rigid and thus we have a generation of designers that work in text.... but it just s…
WYSIWYG is to web design what paint-by-number is to painting.
Re: YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
#90This incident strikes me as a glaring example of how broken web design is. A simple page like that should be easier and faster to create from scratch using a WYSIWYG tool, and then publish to a web platform that support it.... than copying the source and then editing it in a text editor. I know in the past such WYSIWYG tools were too rigid and thus we have a generation of designers that work in text.... but it just s…
A simple page like that should be easier and faster to create from scratch using a WYSIWYG tool... I'd argue that landing pages are the most important and most complex pages to get right.
Perhaps, but definitely not from a technical perspective. They're often going to be the simplest. A good WYSIWYG tool would make iterating on the design much easier.