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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This one doesn't even bother to rewrite the CSS; it just takes the cloned CSS from Obtuse. The snake eats its own tail.

Obtvse was open-sourced for a reason: so that people could take it and modify it and use it however they'd like. This is open-source working.

You keep telling yourself that.

I don't see what's so difficult, Thomas. A clever, smug person posted about a project of his and behaved poorly when people complained about not having access to it. So somebody else cloned it – not to steal the thunder, but to let people use the program. Now it's been cloned again and spreads a little further. I'm sure the guy that open-sourced it considers this a victory, inasmuch as the idea has spread even further.

If Dustin's stopped sulking about his little change-the-world club being subverted and opened up, he's probably happy about this too: this idea that he came up with and worked on is so popular that people are making an effort to spread it further. If his actual idea is even greater and grander, then when Svtble opens up people will flock to it and thank him for it. Everybody wins.

You have to give him some credit that he is using this opportunity to defend Curtis and build a powerful relationship when everyone else is slamming him. People don't forget it when you defend them when few others will.

I don't know Dustin Curtis or care particularly too much about Dustin Curtis. What I remember about him was that he wrote a blog post about American Airlines that got a lot of play that I found simultaneously smug and naive in that infuriating way designers sometimes have, and that he spent a lot of time making all his blog posts look different.

What I don't like is bullying. This whole site spent a week chasing a YC company around with a pitchfork and torches for stealing designs from a well-known company, but when some guy writes some promo copy that enough people here don't like, HN manages to spawn a meme that the same copying is somehow liberation for the cause of open source.

People are allowed to choose who they associate with. Dustin Curtis does not need to "open up" his little club. For crissakes, you're writing this on the message board of an exclusive club that won't have you as a member.

"Powerful relationship with Dustin Curtis". Sheesh.

Copying is liberation. You're freed from relying on the original instance.

The issue I took with Dustin wasn't just the idiocy with which he decided making a pretty blog equated to somehow creating the future of journalism. It was how, when people on this site complained about his copy, his response wasn't "it was a joke" or "this is still a private beta" but "good, my marketing worked because you'll remember it".

If Dustin didn't want his private little club to go public, he could have chosen not to write about Svtble at all, and we'd have no idea of what it looked like behind the scenes. Once he went public, his ideas became a part of every "club" that cared to look at them, including ours. You are always responsible for what you do in public. Always.

It's twisted to look at the response as "bullying". Somebody copied a public idea and released it to people who didn't have access to it yet. Partly in response to Dustin's saying, "You know what, I don't care if I offend you, as long as you pay attention to me." The only way that the open-sourcing was bullying was that it turns out Dustin does care about offending people after all. Not that he seems to have learned anything from this, other than "people on that web site don't like me and that sucks."

Give me a fucking break. If he didn't want to be chased around by a pack of trolls, he could have just chosen not to write. What a detestable sentiment.

Feel free to score yourself another 20-50 karma points by cheerleading this bullshit. I'm done, I hope, with this thread.

You started this conversation, Thomas. You don't get a break when you're the one actively participating.

I don't mind seeing interesting ideas freed from smug people who'd rather hoard them publicly. I don't mind seeing interesting ideas freed from anybody, really; by simply stating an idea in public, you're setting it free. But I especially don't mind when it's Dustin Curtis, whose ideas are small enough to be freed so easily and whose ego is huge enough that we get such an overblown response.

(In response to your post-edit: Nobody's trolling him. They're creating a service which, it seems, many more than just 6 people want. Why is spreading a good idea considered trolling?)

Pay attention to the language you're using: "smug", "huge ego", "overblown response", "idiocy", etc.

You're trying to make this out to be a principled stance about "spreading ideas", and yet with every post you undermine that claim and make it clear that it's really about "Dustin Curtis is a jerk, so fuck him."

Dustin Curtis is a jerk. But I thought I'd made it clear that I wouldn't have minded this happening even if it had happened to somebody else.

Ultimately, what's valuable about Svtble is where Dustin's capable of taking it, both as a network and as a platform. These spinoffs can't touch that, because they're not Dustin. If Dustin ends up launching a great platform, then the copycats won't be able to touch him. Until he launches anything, however, I see no problem with people seeing his concepts and launching copycats, especially not if they're open-sourcing the clones.

I didn't see Dustin's supposedly arrogant comments back when this shitstorm blew in, but I still don't understand why anyone thinks this is OK. Was Dustin upset about people copying the backend? because, I don't see a problem with someone taking his "ideas instead of drafts" bit and running with it. What is completely unacceptable is the wholesale copying of his visual deign. We now have two different "open source" blogging systems that allow people to create websites that look pretty much exactly like Dustin's, without his permission. That's shitty and wrong. Dustin created a visual brand for himself, and yes, six others. No one has the right to take that and use it for themselves without his permission. There is no "liberation" in using someone else's design, there is only theft.

The design is not his design. Please compare the two before jumping to that conclusion. The copy has stripped all unique elements of Dustin's design.

http://obtvse.herokuapp.com http://dcurt.is

Uh huh. What's a well-known site elsewhere on the Internet that looks more similar to Dustin's than yours?

Already showed you one in the other thread. Done playing with the trolls..

That is laughable. I did compare the two before writing my post, and arguing that the one would not be mistaken for the other is preposterous. When I see the copied design I see nothing but papered over choices Dustin made. If you, and more importantly, the other people who have been defending this really believe that the design is unique, it totally explains why this started such a huge argument on HN, the two sides are not even arguing about the same thing.

1. No one cares if you take Dustin's concept that pre-published posts should be called "ideas" instead of posts and have lower overhead. He told us all about it, he gave it away. Open source it, it's a great idea, everyone should be able to host their own blog and have as little overhead as possible in nurturing ideas into posts.

2. It is wrong to take someone's design and just use it for yourself. It seem especially shitty to do this when someone has announced they are going to try and make money off of using that design as a brand. This obviously gets pretty grey pretty fast but there is a line and this copy crosses it. It's cool to use other people's work to guide your own, that's how we learn. But when you take something, you have to make it your own. Imagine if I took kottke's css and changed the bars on top from blue to red, it would not only be wrong but silly. Aping someone else's style is not how you want your blog to be remembered.

While it is easy to point at things that are apparent hypocrisies, and blast them as such, it may be that there are other factors at play then the dimension that has the conflict. Perhaps when a for-profit company takes the work of another for-profit company, it is wrong, because there is harm. Perhaps when someone touts how awesome his ideas are, for the sake of publicity, with vague claims of "if you're lucky I'll let you near the brilliance some day" it is a different scenario. If the goal is publicity and auto-horn-sounding, then people copying is furthering the goal of publicity - and as such, it becomes hard to see where damage is done, other than to perhaps an ego (damage here being "maybe my idea isn't so brilliant, it it's a day before people can do it themselves, oh it hurts not being a genius").

Or perhaps you are also suggesting that those who point at things like the "one-click" and other trivial software patents are also hypocrites? Maybe the degree of copying is different in the cases (I actually am unsure here)?

Anyway, point being, there are many dimensions to analyze in human behavior, and conflict in one, does not necessarily amount to bullying or hypocrisy.

Agreed. It goes without saying that you are anything but obsequious. Much respect you for doing it for the right reasons. You both struck me as similar types for a moment - very talented curmudgeons.

I think Curtis has a very bright future and would be a great collaborator for those who see through the exterior.

I think there's one important distinction to make here. Dustin Curtis wasn't the one who submitted the link to hacker news. So, he wasn't really saying how awesome his product is, ans then saying that we can't have it, as many people said on both the Svbtle post, and the Obtvse post (at least not to Hacker News).

I was still annoyed by the wording by the post, but I think the fact it wasn't meant to be posted to Hacker News should be taken into consideration.

Pretty crazy that one open source project would reuse something from another. :P

i don't think you understand why obtvse was created in the first place

To troll Dustin Curtis? Yeah, I think I get it.

And it succeeded!

More seriously, if you genuinely have a problem with Simple using the CSS from Obtvse, I think you don't understand how open source software works. Either that, or you're being somewhat obtvse yourself.

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