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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Good design ideas are always 'stolen'. As long as it's not exactly the same clone then it's fine. Github's is different enough and looks cool so I don't mind the similarity. And as others have commented there is plenty of other examples in the past of global activity maps.

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This seems to be a blatant ripoff* with no attribution, and since the opening line is the arrogant "GitHub is where the world builds software", I'm not cutting them any slack.

I'm also not forgetting Microsoft's checkered history with open source, or their current deals with government agencies like ICE and the DoD.

* I'm not saying they didn't build it themselves. For companies like Microsoft/GitHub, the design is the hard part and paying engineers is easy.

You’re grasping at a lot of straws here. Showing your business on a globe is pretty old idea. Stripe “ripped off” someone too. Shopify was doing this for cyber monday many years ago.

I also don’t think the ICE and DoD deals are relevant here at all (or to any of Microsofts’s other products)

That's why I said it seems to be a blatant ripoff. I don't know the whole story but I see a similar blog post (but with a lot of corporate self-agrandizment) about a similar design and disagree with the take that I replied to.

The idea of that visualisation has been around since at least 1983.

Combine these two Wargames movie posters:

Globe: https://www.traileraddict.com/wargames/poster/1

Tracking: https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/216876538281839025/

But sure.. it's all a MS conspiracy to steal credit.

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