Without polemics or politics, this ends up presenting one of the strongest moral arguments for open source licensing.
I guess only free software can buck the commercial mandate enough to do that now.
[spoiler] Here is fresh story to learn: OCAD (commercial app) VS OpenOrienteering Mapper (FLOSS alternative to OCAD).[0,1]
TL;DR: If you are trying to create fully free alternative to proprietary software, be ready to the situation where original proprietary software devs would decide to clone[2] unique/original features[3] from your FLOSS app.
[0] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1347209330089717760
[1] https://twitter.com/zerbembasqwibo/status/134946732900922573...
[2] https://www.ocad.com/wiki/ocad/en/index.php?title=Sketch&act...
[3] https://www.openorienteering.org/news/2012/colors-and-sketch...
First, it is good that software feature ideas aren't copyrightable. Arguably many of them shouldn't even be patentable.
That means that yes, proprietary apps can look at your software and say, "that's cool, we should do that too." But it also means that people can write Open Source software that takes lessons from proprietary apps. We want software devs working on productivity tools and practical software to copy each other, we don't want everyone to reinvent the wheel all the time.
I mean, heck, can you imagine if Finale came out with a new feature and that was just it, no other competitors or Open Source apps like MuseScore were allowed to offer that feature? Can you imagine trying to build a piece of software like Blender in that world, where Autodesk had a monopoly on "things that a 3D editor can do?"
Second, 9 years to clone a feature in the world of software is a really long time. If you can launch a piece of software and you have 9 years before other people start building similar things... I mean, what else do you even want at that point? If it takes 9 years for a dev to capitalize on a unique feature in their app, I don't think it's the eventual imitators that are the problem.
I may agree from FLOSS dev side (as I'm itself!), BUT there already was a lot of cases where UI/UX features "was copyrighted".[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc%2E_v%2E_...
> The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's. The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's. Apple lost all claims in the Microsoft suit except for the ruling that the trash can icon and folder icons from Hewlett-Packard's NewWave windows application were infringing. The lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted four years; the decision was affirmed on appeal in 1994, and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.
And then later on:
> After the district court ruled in favor of Microsoft, Apple appealed the decision arguing that the district court only considered infringements on the individual elements of Apple's GUI, rather than the interface as a whole. The appeals court almost entirely affirmed the ruling of the district court, establishing that, "almost all the similarities spring either from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical."
I'm not going to say that copyright expansion isn't a problem, and in general I think that software patents are a giant problem. But surely the answer to that isn't to encourage more expansion or to treat competitors cloning good features like it's something to be avoided.
We should be holding up cases like this as an example of why proprietary developers can't get monopolies on ideas, and we should be normalizing that way of thinking about software. It's not a problem if a proprietary app copies an interface idea from an Open Source app because interface and feature ideas are not copyrightable. We should reinforce in culture that already recognized legal standard whenever possible.
I'm just saying that proprietary/commercial devs already tried to fight for its UI/UX: some wins (due to curios resons), some loose.
As for me, I fully agree on UX/UI should not be copyrighted at all.
That being said, I would not overly romanticize FOSS' achievements in that arena. The lack of investment beyond merely writing functional code and the lack of opinionated design shows in many FOSS products, beyond the point of it being "geared towards repeat users / experts".
A lot of it just has extremely inconsistent interfaces that not only leave visual styling trends but also basic design principles founded upon human perception by the wayside, and that costs everyone, novices and experts.
Additionally, there seems to be a bit of resurgence in productivity apps that favor more keyboard-oriented workflows, or at least also think about how people can become faster and more efficient after the initial onboarding.
I would say… sure, that may be true for many apps. There are plenty of counterexamples, and I’d say MuseScore’s competitors (Finale, Sibelius, Dorico) are good examples of apps that are not tailored towards first-use experience as much as they are tailored for heavy users. They heavily rely on keyboard shortcuts and are modal (often to the point of being arcane, but UX is hard).
Tantacrul's other videos on engraving software UX show some great examples of this, where improvements in UX can help without lowering the productivity plateau for experts (except of course throwing them back if you were to change what they've gotten used to from one version to the next).
Dorico is an interesting case. I'm curious how they were funded. The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated.
> I'm curious how they were funded.
The story of Dorico is pretty simple. Avid bought Sibelius back in 2006 because they needed a good score writing solution—Avid presumably wanted to provide a “complete solution”—but Avid closed the office, and the same team of developers then made Dorico which was bought by Steinberg for presumably the same reasons that Avid bought Sibelius.
Take a look at film/TV scoring, which is where a big chunk of the money is for working composers. There are three main DAWs in use: Pro Tools, Cubase, and Logic Pro. It makes a ton of sense that you’d want to have a score writing program to sell alongside your DAW, so Avid and Steinberg did that by acquiring existing software. Logic Pro can… sort of… already edit scores. Logic is not nearly on the level of a proper score writing program but it’s still fairly solid and works for composition.
> The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated.
This doesn’t follow at all. If you’re a freelance composer or transcriber, then even marginal improvements in productivity can more or less be thought of as pay raises or additional free time. If you’re doing a proper TV or film production, then you might have something like 10% of your entire budget set aside for music.
Composers aren’t really interchangeable anyway—if you want someone to make a decent score for your TV show, then you can’t find them on Fiverr.
My general impression is that when you meet someone who is a professional in a particular field—even if that field is not highly paid—then a $600 business expense that improves productivity is not hard to justify.