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Ask HN: Ethics of Requesting a Demo from a Competitor
I'm considering building a web-based system to make finding domain-specific government publications easier. This is for a friend whose organization cannot afford the cost of a supposedly similar service. However, it likely could be monetized and possibly also improved upon based on the limited information available about the existing provider.
The question is, Is it unethical to register to get a demo of the competitor's offering? I personally feel uncomfortable with the idea, but I get a lot of advice from non-technical people that it's no big deal, and I should do it.
I'm certain people in the HN community have considered or experienced such a quandry.
To be clear, I believe I know what I need to build for my current target user, but I also think this would be a very useful service to other organizations who aren't typically well funded but are working for the public good. Likely I would get some useful additional ideas from seeing what the competition does. The people for whom my potentially improved product would benefit are people who are not current customers of the competition. Of course, if I did build a better mousetrap for a lower price, it could take business from the competition.
- stop50 4y agoThe opensource community has rules against this, because the code is not usable from an legal standpoint.
- z9znz 4y agoI'm not quite sure I follow. In my case, the competitor's product is unseeable unless you get a demo or are a subscriber. So I don't even know what it does (from a UI perspective). I have ideas just based on my understanding of one client's needs. This is not about code. This would just be like getting temporary access as a user to see a software product, as if you were a subscriber.
- stop50 4y agoThey can argue that what you did violated their copyright. The wikipedia article explains it better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
- kazinator 4y agoThat sort of thing will happen no matter what. Microsoft Windows didn't have any Apple Mac code in it; yet in 1988 or so, Apple perpetrated a look-and-feel lawsuit against Microsoft (and lost). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros.... You can hardly write a program to do anything without infringing on multiple patents.
- kazinator 4y agoWhich "opensource community" is this? It can't possibly be the one that ran Unix, while cloning more and more of it until the original was jettisoned?
- stop50 4y agoBSD rewrote everything until nothing was from the original. Wine and reactos use an clean room design. a dirty room design is an legal liability.
- kazinator 4y agoThis "Ask HN" is about viewing a demo. Are you saying that you believe that nobody in Wine or ReactOS had viewed Microsoft Windows? These projects replicate detailed behaviors at the API (and below) level, never mind what you see on the screen.
- yuppie_scum 4y agoIt’s a dog eat dog world. Don’t believe for a second that your competitors wouldn’t do the same thing to you in a heartbeat.