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Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

gitbucket.github.io

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#41
post #11

What am I missing here?? I thought look and feel wasn't copyrightable. Didn't we learn that in the 80's?

I expect it's eligible for the same protection as any other creative work. You can paint a painting in the same style as another artist, but if you straight up copy every stroke from someone else's painting it's copyright infringement.

There has to be a line somewhere between "I own the copyright on the appearance of this painting" and "I own the copyright on the appearance of text documents showing 12pt Times New Roman on a white background" where it no longer qualifies as a copyrightable work, but I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub's page layout fell on the copyrightable side of it.

For another example: magazine page layout. If you designed a magazine and a competing publication in the same industry lifted your design pixel-for-pixel, it'd be lawsuit time. If a satirical magazine did it to imitate your publication, they'd be doing it under a fair-use exception for satire. GitBucket is more like the former.

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#42

GitHub was not wrong to do this. Gitbucket's UI is confusingly similar to GitHub's so I have no qualms with the actions taken. The good thing is that they took a reasonable approach to this.

I'm not sure I understand how someone can get confused between a reputed SaaS like GitHub and something called GitBucket. Don't software engineers look at URLs and page titles nowadays?

Most humans do not pause to consciously inspect the URL and header of every single one of the hundreds or thousands of pages they look at every day, no.

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#43
post #5

I want to applaud GitHub for doing this in a peaceful manner. They have every right to ask this. I think having all project develop their own UI style will allow for more innovation to happen. At GitLab we are greatly inspired by GitHub but over time the GitLab became more distinctive. And that allowed a trickle of innovation to flow back, for example protected branches.

Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights. Too bad to see the smaller is giving up the good fight. Last thing I would care is someone takes my GUI -- only means I designed something extremely useful in the first place. Go ahead! Duplicate for everyone's benefit. And notice they said its a good first start. This will…

> Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights.

Agreed. Remember when one of the complaints about Linux apps was that they used so many different toolkits (e.g. Athena, qt, gtk+ &c.)? Now we use web apps, and every single one looks different, and none of them is as usable as xterm.

'Progress'!

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#44
post #18

I think it's kind of funny they start out by saying: At first, we have never copied any materials from GitHub so this is not problem. But later when you scroll to their footer it says: GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala.

Even the name GitBucket is very confusing. At first, I thought it was referring to BitBucket. But it's not GitHub or BitBucket.

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#46
It kind of looks like this is a cultural difference. It's an Asian project, and it seems like they simply don't care about IP as much over there.

We don't really care about it here either, but we'll at least try to hide it by changing the UI so it doesn't look like a clone, even if it blatantly is.

There, the _point_ is to be a clone. It's sort of a mark of respect.

It's just a very different mentality around this stuff, I hope it can be resolved amicably.

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a violation of GitHub's ToS. GitBucket is hosted on GitHub.

Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s. I hope GitBucket posts the email from Github.

Are you suggesting that GitHub is a monopoly and subject to the Sherman Act?

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#48
Interestingly, Github seems to be in a similar product vs infrastructure quagmire to Twitter.

If Github were an infrastructure company, we'd all want our git repos mirrored there and we'd all want to use the collaboration and reputation APIs.

But viewed through the product lens, Github is a user interface for git which ought to be considered proprietary.

When Github first launched issues, I was hoping that it would be pulled into .git itself, so that we might all manage issues locally using a cli and then sync changes with peer copies of the repo.

Then, when Github launched jobs, I thought the idea was that hiring managers would get a very good sense of a candidate's skills by seeing information surfaced by github about a coder's habits and social network. This would in effect be a big data approach to evaluating a coder as a function of commits, and a meritocratic leader board for the industry.

Then, when Github announced Atom, I was expecting a bunch of Github branded open source tooling, yet the approach seems hesitant and focused on beginners.

All along, Github charges a premium for private repos, which has allowed its competitors to grow.

Now Github has an incentive to become proprietary, because it no longer has a free network effect. With a $100M investment, one needs pretty big numbers to move the needle.

I think a turning point was when Github decided to stop being a rubygems repo. It is exactly that kind of deep integration of hosting, reputation system, and build system that Github offers a unique competitive advantage. Github's search was also broken for years.

This allowed NPM to spring up, but lacking the ability to innovate deeply in the area of reputation the way Github could have.

So now Github has to decide if it can be a trusted platform or if it's going to fight petty battles over producty things like Twitter has done.

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#49
post #20

Looking at the screenshot I thought "Wow, I can see why Github would be annoyed at that" before realising that was their proposed not-at-all-like-github-now-honestly new UI. Their demo looks like they just stole Github's CSS templates.

Really any website that uses one of the major CSS templates (bootstrap, etc) looks pretty much the same. I see a dozen websites a day that all have the same fonts, button styles, layout, etc.

This is still preferable over the travesty that was flash buttons people baked in Fireworks before the dawn of the flashless web.

Re: Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

#50

Looking at the screenshot I thought "Wow, I can see why Github would be annoyed at that" before realising that was their proposed not-at-all-like-github-now-honestly new UI. Their demo looks like they just stole Github's CSS templates.

And Github looks like they're just using Bootstrap.

It's because Github's CSS toolkit is maintained[0] by the same creator of Bootstrap[1], @mdo.

[0] http://primercss.io/about/

[1] http://getbootstrap.com/1.0.0/#footer

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