29 ms·

Codename: Obtvse

889 points by nwienert 15y ago

54mf 15y ago
http://briefmobile.com/images/articles/galaxy-s-vs-iphone.jpg http://briefmobile.com/images/articles/galaxy-s-vs-iphone.jp... Mr. Curtis on the right. Mr. Wienert on the left.
- nicholas_tuzzio 15y ago
  I agree with you in that people seem to be making waaaay too much out of the fact that one of the two did it first.
manmal 15y ago
For me, wanting to set up my own blog soon, this ripoff is a goldmine. It's very easy to start off from the current state of obtvse, customize the look and implement custom features, and (hopefully) Nate and others will provide updates to the engine. I say it's a gift to all of us.
nodemaker 15y ago
Is it just me or is it really silly to fight over who really owns the UI of a rails app that can be made in a few hours. In my opinion the layout of a blogging website falls more in the realm of fashion than intellectual property. Some real intellectual property here is Rails itself which thankfully is open.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Design, especially good design, is hard work. I totally understand a designer being frustrated when their work is copied, even if that copying is reverse-engineered rather than just cut and paste of the css. Personally, I think the design is ugly and hard to use. The OP (of Obtvse thread) should get a designer and make some much needed changes. Edit: Downvoters - is it because I said design is hard work, or because I said I thought the design was ugly?
  - Androsynth 15y ago
    I didn't downvote, but my opinion is this: if you don't want your design copied, make a product that can't be copied easily. For example, bitbucket copied githubs design for the most part, but people still use github because there is so much more to their product. BB can copy them all they want, but github will have the users and will be considered good design while BB gets called a 'clone'. If you make a blog platform, which is simple to clone, just open source it and move on. This is a case where imitation should be flattery. Bask in the glory of knowing the world is switching from wordpress to your platform. (theres also longterm revenue possibilities in that case for a savvy businessmen)
  - nodemaker 15y ago
    Well I thought about this later and I think that Dustin's ideas of a simple,minimalist blog website do have some value in the creation of this product.But I still think it is extremely low compared to the value of Rails or the server OS(probably Linux) or even the database (probably MySQL) that this product will run on. Dustin's initial response to this (which he edited later) and his general attitude might have contributed to my opinion.
- sycr 15y ago
  It was copied in a few hours - not made - the design itself surely took longer than that.
- 54mf 15y ago
  In 6 months, after Svbtle has grown a bit, I'm going to give you a list of the new features. I'd like to see you build a great UI around them in a few hours.
anateus 15y ago
Imitation, flattery, and so forth. Taking an existing closed system and opening it is a pretty fundamental part of the hacker ethic. However, it must be done in good faith and good taste. This is neither. Yes, it's quite hard to draw the line for such things--how big does a company have to be before it's ok? It's a tough question, but despite that ethical uncertainty, this case is pretty clearly on the side of "not ok". Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice. I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.
- zackattack 15y ago
  > this just isn't nice Maybe if Dustin were a nice guy, your argument would have some validity.
  - anateus 15y ago
    I partially address this issue in a reply to drewblaisdell.
  - dorian-graph 15y ago
    Why do people allow themselves to be puppets? We should never give up ourselves to being/doing something simply because John Smith does it.
  - 54mf 15y ago
    Two wrongs don't make a right.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- drewblaisdell 15y ago
  I think this is only "not nice" because of the dcurtis's reaction. He could have very easily just replied "Cute." to this thread and accepted the flattery/parody. No one is arguing that "obtvse" is a better product than his own. For instance, the author of http://drawar.com/ http://drawar.com/ is clearly flattered by dcurtis's own use of his design.
zuralski 15y ago
dcurtis - don't worry about Obtvse. Just keep improving Svbtle and release it when it's ready.
- dorian-graph 15y ago
  Those who clamour after Obtvse don't particularly seem like the original target market. The 'Obtvse' network branding will have little weight as well, I think.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    Yeah it will be missing all the geniuses.
    - zuralski 15y ago
      Open Source is a long race. I believe Dustin cares more about HIS creation than some guy who blatantly ripped it off. To keep contributing to the open source, you need to care beyond "oh, I'm just going to rip off this guy's design because I failed to ask him if he's actually going to open source it, in the first place'. This whole thing seems like terribly short-sighted thing to do. So, Keep Calm and Carry On. The race is long.
      - drivebyacct2 15y ago
        I don't understand your post at all. There are hundreds of highly successful long running open source projects and its absurd to imply that someone is more invested in a project purely because it is closed source rather than open. Further, my comment was merely a testament to the elitism mentioned elsewhere in this thread in regards to Dustin's comment about how his private network is full of geniuses. When I first saw the screenshots I was impressed. Its nothing terribly new but it is simple and streamlined... but I've been using drafts and published posts in blogger and WordPress for years to do this I was much less impressed after his comments about geniuses and his big play about exclusivity. Its basically straight up "look at this cool thing that I have, that you can't have, because I'm more of a genius than you." This us of course isolated from the ethics of cloning the idea... but jeez, at least don't act so damn surprised. This is typical of these scenarios.
damncabbage 15y ago
I don't think building an open clone of a closed platform is a bad thing, but using the same name is a bit of a dick move. Suggested new name: Gavche
- dbaupp 15y ago
  The same name? The original is "Svbtle".
  - damncabbage 15y ago
    Oh. Whoops. Now I feel very silly indeed. I'm not sure how I misread it that badly. (Clone away.)
rprime 15y ago
I assume something went wrong.
timinman 15y ago
http://natewienert.com http://natewienert.com resolves fine, but the link you provided reports: "We're sorry, but something went wrong." :)
- nwienert 15y ago
  Still down? It's up for me.
- nwienert 15y ago
  Back up
  - timinman 15y ago
    Yes, back up for me now, too. You might want to advise users to change the default password and login, since it's publicly viewable on github.
obtu 15y ago
Try this page until the site comes back up: https://github.com/NateW/obtvse#readme https://github.com/NateW/obtvse#readme
dcurtis 15y ago
-- Removed. Perhaps I overreacted. -- As a designer, I find it somewhat perplexing that people here demand that code be directly copied for something like this be wrong. Design is more abstract than code, yes, but it's just as fundamental a part of the resulting product. Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning. Because it is not user facing, identically copied code--when the design has been changed--has no such effects. Why do so many people believe that only copying code should be considered wrong when design has the potential to be more damaging? To me, they are both equally wrong. Great artists steal. Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just please don't copy my implementation or designs. I need those things to be sacred so I can craft experiences that are not diluted by external factors.
- lewispb 15y ago
  Superheroes don't cry in public.
- drewblaisdell 15y ago
  How different would you say his parody of your site is than your site is of http://drawar.com/ http://drawar.com/ ?
  - rdl 15y ago
    I'd even prefer Drawar, if they didn't stretch video objects beyond the implied margins of posts.
  - manmal 15y ago
    I like Dustin's design better, but DAMN.. he clearly borrowed from there :) I don't see a problem here, and I would feel flattered if I were Dustin (or Paul Scrivens).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
stravid 15y ago
Copying my comment from dcurtis thread: You say "In fact, it goes against the very ethos of Hacker News.", do you think your action aligns with the "ethos of Hacker News"? Do you think it's okay to rip-off something just because you think it shouldn't be invite only?
- nwienert 15y ago
  Never said the motivation was because it was invite-only, I just wanted something similar so I created it. I've modified it somewhat, is it still a "rip-off"? Let me know how much more I should modify it before it isn't a "rip-off".
  - stravid 15y ago
    If you look at both versions it should be clear what I mean with rip-off. I don't care if you implement the "ideas panel" or whatever yourself. But if I you take the design and make your version look the same, then it's a rip-off. Yes, you modified it. But please put both versions next to each other and tell me they don't look like each other. As long as you don't have an original design it's a rip-off for me.
  - davidw 15y ago
    I think you should aim for this kind of look to make it clear that you're doing something different: http://bobcargill.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/geocities-izer.jpg http://bobcargill.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/geocities-izer...
- masklinn 15y ago
  Considering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416 Yes?
  - stravid 15y ago
    There is a difference between taking an idea and a design. Put the versions next to each other and tell me they don't look like the same.
drewblaisdell 15y ago
Not to pass any judgment on this issue either way, but is there any way in which this situation is not almost identical to the visitor.js/session.js situation a few months back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416
- hv23 15y ago
  Also not passing judgment, but here's a comment from that thread that might be relevant here: "I'm super impressed you turned this out so quickly. I think that really sums up the spirit in the HN community... When you look at something that seems overpriced (or wrongly-priced) and you say "hey, I bet I could do this""
  - DanBC 15y ago
    If we're "just sayin'" there's another quote from the same thread: > But the fact is - they created something and shared it here. If you think you can do a better job at it - fine, but why haven't you done it before, or at the very least named it differently. I don't mean to exaggerate, but it just doesn't feel ethical to me.
  - jawr 15y ago
    That reminded me of pg's start.html: "It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."
- VMG 15y ago
  I'm fascinated by the fact that this topic is so close to Copyright/RIAA/MPAA, but the discussion is wildly different. It is hard to tell if all the people who jump to the defense of Curtis are also defenders of copyright for music and films, but judging from the comment distribution I think at some people here have to be hypocrites.
  - atonse 15y ago
    For this to be similar, you'd have to make a distinction between someone copying music bit by bit and distributing the original file, vs someone making a COVER recording of a famous song (no matter how accurate), and distributing that for free. No matter how much RIAA and MPAA would like to change it, recording covers for existing music, I believe, is fully supported culturally and legally.
sp332 15y ago
Why call him "Dean" when his name is "Dustin"? Is that part of the joke I missed?
- nwienert 15y ago
  Fixed, apologies.
  - sp332 15y ago
    You didn't fix all of them, search again
joeconway 15y ago
As much as I would love to have access to svbtle I think this ia very good clone which goes too far. Perhaps it would have been a bit more acceptable to take inspiration from the great drafting/publishing pattern which is what makes Svbtle great in my eyes, without mostly copying the UI. I understand you were probably just trying to make a great tool available to the community (Thanks!) but I think you're maybe giving off a false and malicious intent
- nwienert 15y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. Perhaps I did go too far. I will reduce the visual similarities and push up a less similar version. It really only took a few minutes to reproduce.
  - amirmc 15y ago
    I don't think you should change anything. You put it together in a few hours and I don't see a valid reason for changing it. One guy being annoyed that his super-elite design can be replicated in a matter of hours is not a reason to backtrack.
    - judofyr 15y ago
      > One guy being annoyed that his super-elite design can be replicated in a matter of hours is not a reason to backtrack. It took Curtis a lifetime of experience to end up with this design. Simplicity doesn't mean there wasn't hard work behind it.
    - gln 15y ago
      Replication is an easy enough task for anyone competent with Photoshop or CSS/HTML. Copying his design idea is where the issue lies. If it took more hours, would it be a bigger reason to backtrack?
DanBC 15y ago
Unreadable fonts. (Mac Book Pro; snow leopard; Chrome.)
- dagw 15y ago
  Also very hard to read under Windows 7 and chrome
zackattack 15y ago
Good job with this. I forked it in case you get a change of heart.
jklm313 15y ago
OP needs to read this: http://drawar.com/d/the-language-of-design/ http://drawar.com/d/the-language-of-design/
- manmal 15y ago
  There's a name for this: Cargo Cult - copying behaviour without understanding why it exists in the first place. It's a part of human nature, even apes do it (they copy your very moves if they like you). Since we still do it, I suspect it has benefitted us during our previous evolution, and perhaps it still makes sense sometimes.
  - nwienert 15y ago
    The point is, I'm not trying to build a brand, make money off this, or prove anything whatsoever. It was really just an experiment... to see how quickly I could do it and to see how people would react (and to make some good open source software). Notice the name, "obtuse".. But I am glad I got this response, it's been both entertaining and enlightening!
    - willvarfar 15y ago
      > I'm not trying to build a brand, make money off this, or prove anything so you torpedoed Dustin doing so? Nice.
    - manmal 15y ago
      As mentioned in another comment, I really dig what you did. You put it on GH so everybody can build customizations upon it. That's how new things are born. Perhaps it will become a barebone blog template just because it received this whole attention. If Dustin's elite writer concept is good, it will succeed no matter what. Ideas are everywhere, execution is everything.
    - wavephorm 15y ago
      Imitating something that already exists is nowhere near as difficult as creating something truly unique. To create some that's never existed before requires different skills. If know the exact storyboard, functionality, and design should work, then you don't even have to stop and think about anything while implementing it. You don't even need any trial error because someone else did that work already. Carbon copying for vanity just doesn't my respect.
joshmz 15y ago
How is it a ripoff to see something and build your own version? It's not like he copied your codebase or logos or anything else. Is a Mercedes E-Series a rip-off of a BMW 5-series? I guess thats why many of you US guys like patents and shit so much. It just makes no effing sense. He created everything from scratch as far as I am able to see from the GH repo. Thats completely fine with me.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  Is the gimp a copy of photoshop? Is linux a copy of bsd? Making a Free replacement or, more awesome, a better product is worthy of the adulation of your peers. When Microsoft China copied the layout of whatever website it was we all came down on them from our principled pinnacles though, didn't we?
AllenKids 15y ago
Wow, just wow. Guess people really like pirates then, of course, this is Hacker News after all.
hannesfostie 15y ago
What Dustin did, is build a blogging engine he wanted to use himself. He then invited people he respected to write on the platform, people he knew would deliver a certain standard of quality that he'd love to connect his name to. He never said the platform would never be opened, in fact it looked like he might do just that some day. What you did was not just use a concept (add idea to list, expand on it and then publish it when ready), you just took his entire design and published it to the public. Taking a concept and opensourcing it is fine, copying a design and mocking the original creator is not. As much as I'd like to use Dustin's blogging engine (it's the way I'd like to write), I will never use yours out of principle.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  ...mocking the original creator is not. Where did Nate mock Dustin, or even speak negatively about him? Reading his post I find only one mildly negative comment: "I felt Dustin missed out on what have been a great open source contribution."
  - hannesfostie 15y ago
    I assumed that's why he got the name wrong. He edited it after I wrote the comment, I suppose it was a genuine mistake. Still doesn't change how I feel about this. He could have opensourced the engine on itself, taking the design as well is a blatant ripoff. Another thing is this: The goal is simple: when you see the Svbtle design, you should know that the content is guaranteed to be great. By stealing the design, he is completely boycotting Dustin at making this vision of his come true.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      The author has already changed the design in response to Dustin's criticism: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744438 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744438 I'd chalk the design similarity up to "I...typed in rails new obtvse, and a few hours later I'm here."
    - hannesfostie 15y ago
instakill 15y ago
It was only a matter of time, really.
flocore 15y ago
Github: "TODO: Kudos" Blogpost: "Kudos suck"
- nwienert 15y ago
  Thats the joke...
deanpcmad 15y ago
haha brilliant!
deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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livebeef 15y ago
When the technical entry level to join the competition is too low, you _should_ expect clones. Copyright holds automatically on all the code, but just the idea of that kind of blog can't be considered a sufficient "level of creativity" to deserve copyright protection.
kveykva 15y ago
dcurtis' version is generally more attractive in my opinion, and honestly nwienert's site as a whole is less attractive than Dustin's. Even if it is copyright infringement, at least there's that I suppose.
fabfischer 15y ago
Copying ideas or products happens all the time. Some make a lot of cash with it: http://www.techberlin.com/post/19732590058/true-story-the-samwer-brothers-are-now-cloning-amazon http://www.techberlin.com/post/19732590058/true-story-the-sa...
ohsilly 15y ago
From Nate's twitter feed: "Become good at cheating and you'll never need to become good at anything else." Pretty much sums it up.
- nwienert 15y ago
  I stole that from Banksy ;) Check out some of my original work: http://gamegum.com http://gamegum.com http://bassdownload.com http://bassdownload.com http://vbseed.com http://vbseed.com http://webuildappsforyou.com http://webuildappsforyou.com ... Funny enough I wrote that before I had seen svbtle.
  - ohsilly 15y ago
    The thing is Bansky does it with a touch more class. :)
- syaz1 15y ago
  Sorry, 160 characters taken out of context can mean both good or bad. No summing up there.
kveykva 15y ago
Maybe asking first might have been polite, is that a thing? :/
willvarfar 15y ago
We can all appreciate the pleasure Dustin got from perfecting his Svbtle design. His perfection of the authoring flow. Perfection is when there is nothing left to take out, after all. We can all thank Dustin for showing it to us so early. And we can all imagine how he wanted to build a quality brand with it, partly by vouching for the quality of those who use it. You could imagine that monetisation might have been in there too - a startup! We like startups here; we all applaud. We mustn't let Obtvse cheapen that.
- davidw 15y ago
  > startup Successful startups require a barrier to entry for competitors, more often than not.
  - willvarfar 15y ago
    interesting point, not sure; on the social web its community adoption over technology every time
    - daeken 15y ago
      That is the barrier to entry. Take Tumblr for instance: mediocre tech (just going from experience as a user), but it has a massive community invested in it. That is the barrier to entry; anyone attempting to go up against Tumblr has to figure out how to build that community.
obilgic 15y ago
@dcurtis: > Not only did that guy completely rip off my work, but he did it badly, he put the code on Github, and he got my name wrong. What a jackass. > @natebirdman "Hey, I ripped off your work and put it on Github." Really?
mtkd 15y ago
I closed the original post as soon as I sampled the air of superiority that seems to be ever more present with some "intelligent, creative, and witty" developers and commentators. Hail the disruption.
NSElvis 15y ago
Dustin Curtis was a superhero.
camwest 15y ago
The thing he copied was already "open sourced" anyway the minute Dustin blogged about it to the world.
Achshar 15y ago
It's @dcurtis "concept" and let him decide, no matter how ethically wrong his decision is, its his' anyway. Copying the concept and releasing it is definitely not the right way of showing your discontent with his decision of not releasing his work to public. I have an app that is closed source (the kind of thing that you would expect to be opensource but i decided not to). If someone thought that it was better if it was open and copied the concept, UI/UX and released it, i would not be very happy. Community and open is all good and i am all for it but i intend to make a living out if it [my app] and won't be happy seeing it being released. I don't know how much of a work the platform really was but my app was alot of work. more than enough that i would enforce it's closed-source status.
- driverdan 15y ago
  I have 2 words for someone in that situation: tough shit. I can understand not liking new competition but that's business. Innovate, compete, or die.
  - Achshar 15y ago
    but in such case innovation is not an option. if the other person can copy current app why can't he/she copy the innovation too?
kiwim 15y ago
Thank you for sharing it.
chj 15y ago
when replicate something, do not show off how fast you can build it, because it is just replication.
deleted 15y ago
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- jeremymims 15y ago
  I couldn't agree more. This is an utterly toxic set of circumstances. While YC is utterly brilliant, Hacker News is so full of haters that it's downright... uninspiring? What happened to being a supportive community that encouraged people to develop interesting things, helped one another, and could congratulate one another for our successes? Jealousy doesn't really look good on anyone and it's unfortunately become this community's defining trait.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    Someone clones a project after its introduced with neiner-neiner look how cool thus is and you can't have it... and this is reason to bag on all of HN? Or better yet, its a reason to abandon all of open source? Better go back to using IE. Have fun.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
      - drivebyacct2 15y ago
        Again, what does open source have to do with any of this? Designers steal from designers regardless of the openness of the back end or availability of unobfuscated CSS.
    - jeremymims 15y ago
      Of course I'm not giving up open source software (we use it in our YC backed startup). But the attitude of this community has changed since four years ago... for the worse. In the past, when someone submitted something to the community, they got feedback. Today we get mindless copying, downvoting of dissenting opinions, and rationalizations why it's a good thing to take people's work and then taunt them about it. I suspect this attitude will result in good people backing away from HN and it will definitely reduce the positive exchange of ideas. It's not just "not nice", it's mean. And it's the opposite of the experience that I had at YC and continue to have with YC founders. There's a spirit of camaraderie and helpfulness that's almost completely lacking in this thread and has been present in every story about a startup being acquired. In a way, it's very un-YC. I'm not sure how useful a community like this is to people who create things and want to share them with others. The Haters have stormed the gates and have taken over. When's the next time you think Dustin will share a valuable or interesting concept he's working on?
reason 15y ago
Guys, if someone dangled something in front of you with the initial impression that you could have one, and you wanted it, only later to find out that you actually can't have it and that those who could have it are "intelligent and witty", implying that you are not, then I think it's pretty safe to say that you'd run home, cook something similar up and run back to show that you have one now too. In fact, after reading the original article, I felt a bit slighted and thought to myself "fine, I'll just build it myself".
- 54mf 15y ago
  Your metaphor is wholly flawed. This would be like if you wanted to get in to a restaurant because of the great food, decor, and excellent ties the waiters were wearing, but couldn't get in. So you went next door and created your own restaurant with the same recipes, decor, and ties on the waiters, but let anyone in. Building something with similar functionality is one thing; building a stem-to-stern carbon copy is just low class.
  - reason 15y ago
    So, what's wrong with that? I'd eat at the second restaurant in a heartbeat if getting into the first is too much of a hassle. You would too.
    - 54mf 15y ago
      You make an awful lot of assumptions about how others would act. I definitely wouldn't eat at the second restaurant, because they'd be scumbags for ripping off the first restaurant and I wouldn't want to support them. Exclusivity is not a license to, nor a justification for, outright copying.
      - reason 15y ago
        Right, so if I built an Augusta National for the public, I'd be considered a scumbag.
DanBC 15y ago
(http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/pirated/ http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/pirated/) Mentions this screenshot: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliotjaystocks/516412232/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliotjaystocks/516412232/) See also the (now dead, unfortunately) pirated sites. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/) (http://www.pirated-sites.com/ http://www.pirated-sites.com/)
Permit 15y ago
Dustin Curtis' outraged seems somewhat bizarre for someone whose blog/Twitter logo is an obvious rework of the Flash logo: https://www.google.ca/search?q=flash+dc&hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1C1SNNT_enCA471CA471&biw=1538&bih=839&tbm=isch&tbs=simg:CAESEgmXdw-T4So2QiFAmAs61EEH2w https://www.google.ca/search?q=flash+dc&hl=en&safe=o... https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1902246181/logo10.png https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1902246181/logo10.png Not that I fault either designer. I think they've both taken previous work, improved upon it (or at least altered it), in some way before releasing it as their own. I suppose I have trouble feeling sorry for Dustin after reading he planned to open it up to those he thought worthy of its use.
- 54mf 15y ago
  How is Obtvse, in any way, an improvement upon or alteration of Svbtle? As far as I can tell, it's a 1:1 clone, but "open".
  - Permit 15y ago
    It's not a 1:1 clone. Put them side by side and you'll quickly see differences in font choice and size as well as positioning of several elements. I'm not saying it's not similar, but it's certainly not a clone. And I'd like to think that being open-source is a huge feature of Ovbtuse, and something certainly worth noting when comparing the two.
    - 54mf 15y ago
      Okay, perhaps not a 1:1 clone, but definitely a rip-off. Mr. Wienert posted examples of his other work in this thread, and I think it's safe to assume he wouldn't have come close to the Svbtle UI if left to his own devices.
      - unalone 15y ago
        Seriously? It's a two-column interface with extra heaps of whitespace and thick borders. Yeah, Obtvse imitates Svtble – that's the point. It's not like it was imitating anything especially unique or difficult to conceive.
J3L2404 15y ago
This kerfuffle is amusing on a site that believes copyright violation is a moral imperative.
- jcdreads 15y ago
  Without addressing the merits of either copyright or patent protection, I believe you're confusing the two. Folks around here tend to believe that software patents are bad; the view that copyright is bad is less widely shared. In fact, open source licenses /rely/ on the protections afforded by copyright law.
athst 15y ago
I think that there's a distinction to be made between copying code and copying design. Design is hard, and even though a design might be quick to implement in code, that doesn't mean the design was easy. Just look at the Samwer brothers - they clone every good startup that comes out. Is what they do okay? Maybe they don't copy any of the code from the successful site, but they shamelessly copy the design, which is often the hardest part of the creation process and the main reason why the original site was so successful in the first place.
- itsmicks 15y ago
  Didn't see this and brought up the Samwers as well. I think we're still in a transition around here in terms of how "design" is valued but overall it seems like things are improving.
madasahatta 15y ago
copycats are not cool cats
ForrestN 15y ago
Those who are talking about this as if the design and concept are just being stolen are acting, well, obtuse. Wienert is not trying to pass this off as his own work. He's not selling it. It's a few things, all at once: first, and foremost, it's a parody, skewering the absurd arrogance of the original presentation; it's a generic drug, making something which sure seems to be exclusive for bad reasons and making it accesible; and it's a good example of someone taking matters into their own hands. Wienert was told something wasn't available to him because he's not witty enough, so he went and built it for himself. To compare this to someone stealing someone's intellectual property malevolently for personal gain is missing the point.
- irahul 15y ago
  > Wienert is not trying to pass this off as his own work. He's not selling it. He can pass this off as his own work and sell it for all I care. I don't know who created the first blogging engine, but do you believe all subsequent blogging engines owe something to the first one, and shouldn't have re-implemented and sold it without making it substantially different?
  - ForrestN 15y ago
    No, and I probably agree with you, but I'm just trying to point out that you don't have to subscribe to what appears to be a more controversial idea (that copying and possibly selling a piece of software is OK) in order to support what Wienert has done.
  - rokhayakebe 15y ago
    A guy who makes a new chair doesn’t owe money to everyone who ever built a chair.
cjbprime 15y ago
Dumb technical question: What's the purpose of the "Aside" flag in Obtvse? I can see that it sets a class for CSS, can't see an equivalent in the Svbtle UI.
dewiz 15y ago
A blogger discover "drafts". He shares the idea only with VIPs. I'll use Gmail drafts.
alpb 15y ago
Anyone thinks to create a WordPress Theme out of this design? That would be huge.
- alpb 15y ago
  Ok, one of my friends started working on open source wordpress theme design that clones this design. (as much as it can) in first version, we'll omit comments (listing and posting) then maybe we can add. I'll let you know over HN.
funkah 15y ago
I'm sick of that invite-only horseshit too. If you're gonna share it privately don't announce it to the world. Don't wave a steak in front of my face and then walk it over to the VIP section. I don't care if this is petty, I am serious as a heart attack about it now. I refuse to use Google+ for this reason, and a couple other things too.
itsmicks 15y ago
It's pretty clear that the innovation in Dustin's work wasn't the code -- it was the interface. Pointing out that Nate built Obtvse in a day from scratch is pretty meaningless and the fact that he bothered to recreate it makes it pretty clear that Dustin built something cool. As a designer... it just feels like this wasn't Nate's to open source and hopefully this will transition further from the original. On the flipside, if the Samwer brothers launched a version of Svbtle next week in 15 markets, would the reaction be the same?
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  > It's pretty clear that the innovation in Dustin's work wasn't the code -- it was the interface. What part? While it looked pretty, I didn't see anything new or unique (outside of the liking mechanism he uses).
  - itsmicks 15y ago
    Perhaps I'm not familiar, but what CMS/blogging engine looks like his and is structured like his (esp in the admin)?
    - jasonlotito 15y ago
      The list of articles/ideas/drafts? The full screen editing mode? Which part? I'll grant him the UI is new, but in essence, it's a skin over existing concepts. And, to be clear, when I say UI, I'm referring to the the colors and graphics. Sort of like someone coming up with a new theme for Firefox. You still have the form of a browser, just with different colors, padding, and images. So again, I pose my question, where is the new, unique, non-obvious innovation here? You seem to have some interest in defending this idea, so maybe you can answer this. I'm not a designer, so clearly, I might be missing something. Edit: Just to be clear here, for one example, was when I saw his distraction free writing screen, it reminded me of the countless other implementations I've seen for other blogging platforms, not to mention what's built into Word and Pages (with Word's being far more elegant).
rounak 15y ago
One word: sense of entitlement
cletus 15y ago
While I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of people who have their work ripped off, I can't muster a sense of outrage here. Fact is, one guy cloned what was a closed platform (that had been openly announced and displayed) based on the idea and screenshots alone in about 11 hours (based on the HN submission interval). If someone can do that--and does--you really haven't invented or created anything (substantive). This just leaves the issue of whether the design and the assets (CSS, images, etc) are substantive and have been used without permission. Based on other comments, there seems to be no issue of asset "theft". So does the minimalist design copy warrant outrage? Honestly, no. Someone has basically invented what amounts to a Wordpress theme. If dcurtis can create a scalable, reliable platform for hosting it then great. It worked well enough for Wordpress. Exclusivity and invite-only are time-honoured ways of scaling controllably and--let's be honest--creating hype and desire but if you're not ready for the copycats and it takes the copycats so little time that their HN submission makes it to the front page while yours is still there... that's your problem.
- dangoldin 15y ago
  I'd make a counterpoint. It probably took Dustin years to get to the skill level he's at now. Most of the work here was in the design and "ideation" stage rather than the CSS/HTML/JS. Once something is built it only requires the necessary tech skills to copy it. Reminds me of a story about Picasso: A woman asks Picasso to paint a painting of her, five minutes later there's a wonderful painting of her. When she asks Picasso how much she owes, he quotes her 5,000 francs. She's surprised by how much it is and tells him that it only took him 5 minutes. He responds with "No, it took me my entire life." This is an extreme comparison but I just want to highlight that there's a value to the experience that people have. As hackers we tend to underestimate that since we focus on the more visible tech skills.
  - loceng 15y ago
    Sadly ideas aren't valued in the business world, only execution is promoted as the important part - so people trying to make profit can feel less guilty.
brettbergeron 15y ago
Sorry if I missed it, but it looks like the real victim of plagiarism would be: http://drawar.com/ http://drawar.com/ Honestly, nothing about the design or user experience of Svbtle was unique. There have to be more examples, at least by coincidence, of other designs that show prior use of similar typography and layout. So really, this whole debate of originality seems moot.
ux_designer 15y ago
Dustin Curtis didn't create a blogging platform, he created another PR and traffic grab. Which is great for his career and visibility. But come on, the only way this could get any more farcical is if Dustin revealed that he orchestrated this whole thing and is in fact both parties. If I were Dustin, I'd be ecstatic that I'd almost permanently glued to the front page of HN. Any publicity is good publicity.
- zachallia 15y ago
  i hope he is both parties, that would be pretty epic
- Androsynth 15y ago
  Nice conspiracy theory, but why would his main persona act like such a bumbling fool while his foil persona gets the respect? and a large amount of hate, but the scale is tipping mostly in his defense
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Stratego 15y ago
If you want to roll your own, don't steal the man's hard design work if you're going to plagiarize his concept anyway. Dustin is often quite cocky, but I don't wish this kind of mindless copying on anyone.
stevewilhelm 15y ago
If anyone is looking for "prior art" for Obtvse or Svbtle should look at Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal implements multiple columns of one line ideas, in Pivotal's case they are features or bugs instead of blog posts.
nchlswu 15y ago
I find it fascinating the disdain people have for Dustin because of his attitude (which is pretty consistent if you follow him) and how he presented Svbtle. Clearly he was sharing some concepts and ideas that he felt were worth sharing and may be useful to colleagues in the industry. But because of (perhaps too 'arrogant') copy and the fact that Dustin didn't want people to use it for the time being, a significant portion of this 'community' felt compelled to simply rip off his work in to spite him. I don't get it. Without getting into the merits of when stealing something is justifiable why is such maliciousness so 'justified' to some in this case?
littlemerman 15y ago
Thank you.
caublestone 15y ago
This is awesome, and a great step past the "Poker blog" you were running back in High school :P.
iamwil 15y ago
I wouldn't worry about it too much were I Dustin. He'll keep continually improving Svbtle from his design insights, whereas Obtvse likely will stagnate. And if it doesn't, the contributors would all be programmers, given it's hosted on github. Chances are, they won't use it often, and they won't have the design intuitions that come with design experience and use. Take it as a form of flattery and just move on. I have faith in his design chops.
- Androsynth 15y ago
  This is an excellent point! Design is supplementary to a good product. But theres so much more to a good product than design. If Obtvse is more popular than Svbtle in the long run, it will be because Dustin himself failed, not because the design was copied. He's already made the wrong decision at every major point imo.
xbryanx 15y ago
My Dad always said the best place to open a new suit store is right next door to the oldest, most established suit store in town.
samstave 15y ago
This is a really interesting circumstance. On the one hand, I don't think the Obtuze is a theft of Subtle -- however I talk crap about Zynga's idea theft (based on look feel UX mechanics etc) all the time. While this is a reverse of Zynga's for profit thievery - this is a "Robin-Hooding" of sorts (taking a closed shiny widget and making an open shiny widget. Ill withhold judgement in this case as i feel it would make me a hypocrite.
jamesjyu 15y ago
Dustin Curtis should really be a marketing/pr person, specifically aimed at startups.
huhtenberg 15y ago
A thing to keep in mind - dcurtis is building a business. A high-profile high-traffic no-nonsense blogging site is a very valuable asset - be it for the purpose of direct advertisement, product placements/mentions or as an acquisition target. Positioning it as exclusive and coming across as arrogant is actually a sensible marketing approach. The design is only a part of the deal, but it's the content that really matters. Cloning the design is surely not without consequences, but in a larger picture it's not that big of deal.
srik 15y ago
It is NOT what the author of thisSvbtle wanted done with his project. He explicitly stated that it wasn't ready for the punlic yet and would be available when he worked things out. He might have seemed smug, but Im apalled that bulk of the HN community seemed seemed to be OK with someone essentially copying his project outright. Im not able to frame my answer better but this is not how how mutually respecting communities are built.
tworats 15y ago
Putting aside the morality of this particular case, I'd point out that this type of copying will discourage early sharing of concepts / projects on HN, which is not a good thing.
- cheald 15y ago
  Counterpoint: If your idea can be fully replicated in 11 hours as an experiment, your idea might not be all that defensible/sustainable in the first place.
shubsengupta 15y ago
As both a designer and a programmer, I'm (oddly enough) in support of obtvse and the thing behind it. Sure, it looks fairly similar, but the 'magic' like the kudos system and the pretty like CSS features that set the two apart are enough for me to distinguish between the original and the clone. From the first article I read on dcurtis' site, I noticed the simplicity to the design and really liked it. When I started to read the article yesterday about his svtble network, I thought to myself, 'sweet, I can finally use this.' And then I got to the last line, and all that went away. I don't like exclusivity, and while the idea behind the 'every time you see this theme it will feature great bloggers' thing was good, I felt like he could have very easily made a stripped down version of the theme that differed a bit from the 'premium model' for the general public to adopt. Or perhaps not even the ‘general public’ but rather one to just release within Hacker News, a (if I make a generalization) smarter than average community. Kudos (pardon the reference) to Nate for churning out some good code in a very short amount of time. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes on from here, and how the two will deal with it.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
This is pretty decent example of the entitlement syndrome I see in the design/development community. We somehow feel like all cool things should be free (as in liberty) and open source and shared, hacked, modified, and improved. And that's great! But when someone comes around with something cool that isn't all of those things like Dustin Curtis did and someone else subsequently clones it, we feel differently all of the sudden. Why is that? We all love StackExchange but when an open source clone came out about a month ago a lot of people were screaming "rip off!" Why? It's really hard to judge when a clone is in poor taste and when it's acceptable. It's an interesting question. If I were judge I'd say Obtvse is perfectly legit. If Svbtle were for everyone then I'd say the clone is in bad taste but it really was only matter of time before someone brought it to the masses so long as the original would never be offered to the rest of us. But that's beside the point. I just think its so interesting that a group of people who demand their music and media free just because they can, and extoll the virtues of (F)OSS, demanding our software be free and throwing massive tantrums when a developer of anything cool or useful doesn't publish the source can turn around and say a clone of a piece of software that's limited to a certain group is now not okay. This can be an IP issue and it's so interesting how we put ourselves in the other guy's shoes so selectively. Copyright, IP, etc. are the root of all evil one day but are useful and need to be considered the next. Maybe I'm missing something but I find popular opinion on this stuff funny at times. This isn't an indictment of dcurtis or the creator of Obtvse. I personally think both are awesome, I love that Obtvse now exists (because I would never be invited to use Svbtle), and I think both developers are just plain awesome. For me, it's just really interesting to see how one action is wrong (along the lines of theft or infringement) but another in the same vain is seen as justified by the same people. Maybe I'm the dumb guy in the room but I see some cognitive dissonance here.
dreamdu5t 15y ago
By D. Curtis' own logic he ripped of the design of http://cargocollective.com/ http://cargocollective.com/
evertonfuller 15y ago
I'm just struggling to see what's so 'revolutionary' about the design. It's just a bland minimalist modern theme. Anyone could have made it. Dustin's response was just plain rude, let's recap: "This is almost unbelievable. No matter what you think about me or my product decisions, it is flatly wrong to ripoff work. It's shameful, even. Please take this site down and delete the Github repository. The work isn't yours. Just wait until Svbtle is finished and open to the public. The reason it's closed is really simple: it's not ready yet." Get over yourself.
farinasa 15y ago
I posted this in the other thread, but I feel it's worth repeating: I'm sorry, but isn't this just a reversion to late 90's style frame design? It seems all you've done is build it in the latest trendy standards and add a few little CSS tricks. Minimalist design is supposed to be about presenting the content first and foremost. But the content is overshadowed by your frame. Your name and flashy CSS tricks are the only constants on the page and take up nearly 25% of the view, but you claim you're trying to draw attention to the content? Perhaps if the content you're presenting is you, then you have a successful design. Of course this version removes the CSS stuff but I think my point stands.
woodall 15y ago
I really love the hover-to-trigger buttons and think DC had a great product. Why rush him to push it to market.
mustafaakin 15y ago
No one is mad at Steve Jobs, when he says "good artists copy, great artists steal", but when it comes to these guys, they are just criminals? I support that theme, minimalism is always good.
skeletonjelly 15y ago
I felt the exact same feelings as the writer when I was reading about it's growing interest. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742647 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742647 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3737549 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3737549 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3731095 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3731095 This was until I saw Dustin say he was going to open the platform up to the public. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742596 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742596 But congrats on going to all that effort to copy one of the most minimalistic blog designs ever. Maybe Dustin should have made it more obvious what his intentions were on the homepage.
mkramlich 15y ago
Then there's how us old farts blog: vi something ...run script to maybe apply template, regen indices... ...preview locally in browser... ...maybe edit again... ...run script to upload (if want to "publish"), commit to VCS, etc... no fancy codebase needed. no web framework, no local web server, no reinventing the wheel, etc. and the same tools used above to "blog" are also used to do lots of other productive things, so leverages the same skill set, exercises the same muscle memory, and more future-proofed.

889 points by nwienert 15y ago

54mf 15y ago

http://briefmobile.com/images/articles/galaxy-s-vs-iphone.jpg http://briefmobile.com/images/articles/galaxy-s-vs-iphone.jp... Mr. Curtis on the right. Mr. Wienert on the left.

nicholas_tuzzio 15y ago
I agree with you in that people seem to be making waaaay too much out of the fact that one of the two did it first.

manmal 15y ago

For me, wanting to set up my own blog soon, this ripoff is a goldmine. It's very easy to start off from the current state of obtvse, customize the look and implement custom features, and (hopefully) Nate and others will provide updates to the engine. I say it's a gift to all of us.

nodemaker 15y ago

Is it just me or is it really silly to fight over who really owns the UI of a rails app that can be made in a few hours. In my opinion the layout of a blogging website falls more in the realm of fashion than intellectual property. Some real intellectual property here is Rails itself which thankfully is open.

DanBC 15y ago
Design, especially good design, is hard work. I totally understand a designer being frustrated when their work is copied, even if that copying is reverse-engineered rather than just cut and paste of the css. Personally, I think the design is ugly and hard to use. The OP (of Obtvse thread) should get a designer and make some much needed changes. Edit: Downvoters - is it because I said design is hard work, or because I said I thought the design was ugly?
- Androsynth 15y ago
  I didn't downvote, but my opinion is this: if you don't want your design copied, make a product that can't be copied easily. For example, bitbucket copied githubs design for the most part, but people still use github because there is so much more to their product. BB can copy them all they want, but github will have the users and will be considered good design while BB gets called a 'clone'. If you make a blog platform, which is simple to clone, just open source it and move on. This is a case where imitation should be flattery. Bask in the glory of knowing the world is switching from wordpress to your platform. (theres also longterm revenue possibilities in that case for a savvy businessmen)
- nodemaker 15y ago
  Well I thought about this later and I think that Dustin's ideas of a simple,minimalist blog website do have some value in the creation of this product.But I still think it is extremely low compared to the value of Rails or the server OS(probably Linux) or even the database (probably MySQL) that this product will run on. Dustin's initial response to this (which he edited later) and his general attitude might have contributed to my opinion.
sycr 15y ago
It was copied in a few hours - not made - the design itself surely took longer than that.
54mf 15y ago
In 6 months, after Svbtle has grown a bit, I'm going to give you a list of the new features. I'd like to see you build a great UI around them in a few hours.

anateus 15y ago

Imitation, flattery, and so forth. Taking an existing closed system and opening it is a pretty fundamental part of the hacker ethic. However, it must be done in good faith and good taste. This is neither. Yes, it's quite hard to draw the line for such things--how big does a company have to be before it's ok? It's a tough question, but despite that ethical uncertainty, this case is pretty clearly on the side of "not ok". Disregarding more complicated moral aspects, this just isn't nice. I really don't think nwienert's intentions were bad, but I think he should reevaluate the choice he made here.

zackattack 15y ago
> this just isn't nice Maybe if Dustin were a nice guy, your argument would have some validity.
- anateus 15y ago
  I partially address this issue in a reply to drewblaisdell.
- dorian-graph 15y ago
  Why do people allow themselves to be puppets? We should never give up ourselves to being/doing something simply because John Smith does it.
- 54mf 15y ago
  Two wrongs don't make a right.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
drewblaisdell 15y ago
I think this is only "not nice" because of the dcurtis's reaction. He could have very easily just replied "Cute." to this thread and accepted the flattery/parody. No one is arguing that "obtvse" is a better product than his own. For instance, the author of http://drawar.com/ http://drawar.com/ is clearly flattered by dcurtis's own use of his design.

zuralski 15y ago

dcurtis - don't worry about Obtvse. Just keep improving Svbtle and release it when it's ready.

dorian-graph 15y ago
Those who clamour after Obtvse don't particularly seem like the original target market. The 'Obtvse' network branding will have little weight as well, I think.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  Yeah it will be missing all the geniuses.
  - zuralski 15y ago
    Open Source is a long race. I believe Dustin cares more about HIS creation than some guy who blatantly ripped it off. To keep contributing to the open source, you need to care beyond "oh, I'm just going to rip off this guy's design because I failed to ask him if he's actually going to open source it, in the first place'. This whole thing seems like terribly short-sighted thing to do. So, Keep Calm and Carry On. The race is long.
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      I don't understand your post at all. There are hundreds of highly successful long running open source projects and its absurd to imply that someone is more invested in a project purely because it is closed source rather than open. Further, my comment was merely a testament to the elitism mentioned elsewhere in this thread in regards to Dustin's comment about how his private network is full of geniuses. When I first saw the screenshots I was impressed. Its nothing terribly new but it is simple and streamlined... but I've been using drafts and published posts in blogger and WordPress for years to do this I was much less impressed after his comments about geniuses and his big play about exclusivity. Its basically straight up "look at this cool thing that I have, that you can't have, because I'm more of a genius than you." This us of course isolated from the ethics of cloning the idea... but jeez, at least don't act so damn surprised. This is typical of these scenarios.

damncabbage 15y ago

I don't think building an open clone of a closed platform is a bad thing, but using the same name is a bit of a dick move. Suggested new name: Gavche

dbaupp 15y ago
The same name? The original is "Svbtle".
- damncabbage 15y ago
  Oh. Whoops. Now I feel very silly indeed. I'm not sure how I misread it that badly. (Clone away.)

rprime 15y ago

I assume something went wrong.

timinman 15y ago

http://natewienert.com http://natewienert.com resolves fine, but the link you provided reports: "We're sorry, but something went wrong." :)

nwienert 15y ago
Still down? It's up for me.
nwienert 15y ago
Back up
- timinman 15y ago
  Yes, back up for me now, too. You might want to advise users to change the default password and login, since it's publicly viewable on github.

obtu 15y ago

Try this page until the site comes back up: https://github.com/NateW/obtvse#readme https://github.com/NateW/obtvse#readme

dcurtis 15y ago

-- Removed. Perhaps I overreacted. -- As a designer, I find it somewhat perplexing that people here demand that code be directly copied for something like this be wrong. Design is more abstract than code, yes, but it's just as fundamental a part of the resulting product. Copying design, especially when the original source is so obvious, has damaging effects that are hard to quantify. Poor clones can directly damage the creation of a strong original brand and can preempt future creative product positioning. Because it is not user facing, identically copied code--when the design has been changed--has no such effects. Why do so many people believe that only copying code should be considered wrong when design has the potential to be more damaging? To me, they are both equally wrong. Great artists steal. Please steal my ideas. Take them, manipulate them, and build them into something that is your own. I wouldn't have publicized my new platform if I didn't expect the ideas to be used. Just please don't copy my implementation or designs. I need those things to be sacred so I can craft experiences that are not diluted by external factors.

lewispb 15y ago
Superheroes don't cry in public.
drewblaisdell 15y ago
How different would you say his parody of your site is than your site is of http://drawar.com/ http://drawar.com/ ?
- rdl 15y ago
  I'd even prefer Drawar, if they didn't stretch video objects beyond the implied margins of posts.
- manmal 15y ago
  I like Dustin's design better, but DAMN.. he clearly borrowed from there :) I don't see a problem here, and I would feel flattered if I were Dustin (or Paul Scrivens).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

stravid 15y ago

Copying my comment from dcurtis thread: You say "In fact, it goes against the very ethos of Hacker News.", do you think your action aligns with the "ethos of Hacker News"? Do you think it's okay to rip-off something just because you think it shouldn't be invite only?

nwienert 15y ago
Never said the motivation was because it was invite-only, I just wanted something similar so I created it. I've modified it somewhat, is it still a "rip-off"? Let me know how much more I should modify it before it isn't a "rip-off".
- stravid 15y ago
  If you look at both versions it should be clear what I mean with rip-off. I don't care if you implement the "ideas panel" or whatever yourself. But if I you take the design and make your version look the same, then it's a rip-off. Yes, you modified it. But please put both versions next to each other and tell me they don't look like each other. As long as you don't have an original design it's a rip-off for me.
- davidw 15y ago
  I think you should aim for this kind of look to make it clear that you're doing something different: http://bobcargill.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/geocities-izer.jpg http://bobcargill.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/geocities-izer...
masklinn 15y ago
Considering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416 Yes?
- stravid 15y ago
  There is a difference between taking an idea and a design. Put the versions next to each other and tell me they don't look like the same.

drewblaisdell 15y ago

Not to pass any judgment on this issue either way, but is there any way in which this situation is not almost identical to the visitor.js/session.js situation a few months back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416

hv23 15y ago
Also not passing judgment, but here's a comment from that thread that might be relevant here: "I'm super impressed you turned this out so quickly. I think that really sums up the spirit in the HN community... When you look at something that seems overpriced (or wrongly-priced) and you say "hey, I bet I could do this""
- DanBC 15y ago
  If we're "just sayin'" there's another quote from the same thread: > But the fact is - they created something and shared it here. If you think you can do a better job at it - fine, but why haven't you done it before, or at the very least named it differently. I don't mean to exaggerate, but it just doesn't feel ethical to me.
- jawr 15y ago
  That reminded me of pg's start.html: "It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."
VMG 15y ago
I'm fascinated by the fact that this topic is so close to Copyright/RIAA/MPAA, but the discussion is wildly different. It is hard to tell if all the people who jump to the defense of Curtis are also defenders of copyright for music and films, but judging from the comment distribution I think at some people here have to be hypocrites.
- atonse 15y ago
  For this to be similar, you'd have to make a distinction between someone copying music bit by bit and distributing the original file, vs someone making a COVER recording of a famous song (no matter how accurate), and distributing that for free. No matter how much RIAA and MPAA would like to change it, recording covers for existing music, I believe, is fully supported culturally and legally.

sp332 15y ago

Why call him "Dean" when his name is "Dustin"? Is that part of the joke I missed?

nwienert 15y ago
Fixed, apologies.
- sp332 15y ago
  You didn't fix all of them, search again

joeconway 15y ago

As much as I would love to have access to svbtle I think this ia very good clone which goes too far. Perhaps it would have been a bit more acceptable to take inspiration from the great drafting/publishing pattern which is what makes Svbtle great in my eyes, without mostly copying the UI. I understand you were probably just trying to make a great tool available to the community (Thanks!) but I think you're maybe giving off a false and malicious intent

nwienert 15y ago
Thank you for the feedback. Perhaps I did go too far. I will reduce the visual similarities and push up a less similar version. It really only took a few minutes to reproduce.
- amirmc 15y ago
  I don't think you should change anything. You put it together in a few hours and I don't see a valid reason for changing it. One guy being annoyed that his super-elite design can be replicated in a matter of hours is not a reason to backtrack.
  - judofyr 15y ago
    > One guy being annoyed that his super-elite design can be replicated in a matter of hours is not a reason to backtrack. It took Curtis a lifetime of experience to end up with this design. Simplicity doesn't mean there wasn't hard work behind it.
  - gln 15y ago
    Replication is an easy enough task for anyone competent with Photoshop or CSS/HTML. Copying his design idea is where the issue lies. If it took more hours, would it be a bigger reason to backtrack?

DanBC 15y ago

Unreadable fonts. (Mac Book Pro; snow leopard; Chrome.)

dagw 15y ago
Also very hard to read under Windows 7 and chrome

zackattack 15y ago

Good job with this. I forked it in case you get a change of heart.

jklm313 15y ago

OP needs to read this: http://drawar.com/d/the-language-of-design/ http://drawar.com/d/the-language-of-design/

manmal 15y ago
There's a name for this: Cargo Cult - copying behaviour without understanding why it exists in the first place. It's a part of human nature, even apes do it (they copy your very moves if they like you). Since we still do it, I suspect it has benefitted us during our previous evolution, and perhaps it still makes sense sometimes.
- nwienert 15y ago
  The point is, I'm not trying to build a brand, make money off this, or prove anything whatsoever. It was really just an experiment... to see how quickly I could do it and to see how people would react (and to make some good open source software). Notice the name, "obtuse".. But I am glad I got this response, it's been both entertaining and enlightening!
  - willvarfar 15y ago
    > I'm not trying to build a brand, make money off this, or prove anything so you torpedoed Dustin doing so? Nice.
  - manmal 15y ago
    As mentioned in another comment, I really dig what you did. You put it on GH so everybody can build customizations upon it. That's how new things are born. Perhaps it will become a barebone blog template just because it received this whole attention. If Dustin's elite writer concept is good, it will succeed no matter what. Ideas are everywhere, execution is everything.
  - wavephorm 15y ago
    Imitating something that already exists is nowhere near as difficult as creating something truly unique. To create some that's never existed before requires different skills. If know the exact storyboard, functionality, and design should work, then you don't even have to stop and think about anything while implementing it. You don't even need any trial error because someone else did that work already. Carbon copying for vanity just doesn't my respect.

joshmz 15y ago

How is it a ripoff to see something and build your own version? It's not like he copied your codebase or logos or anything else. Is a Mercedes E-Series a rip-off of a BMW 5-series? I guess thats why many of you US guys like patents and shit so much. It just makes no effing sense. He created everything from scratch as far as I am able to see from the GH repo. Thats completely fine with me.

willvarfar 15y ago
Is the gimp a copy of photoshop? Is linux a copy of bsd? Making a Free replacement or, more awesome, a better product is worthy of the adulation of your peers. When Microsoft China copied the layout of whatever website it was we all came down on them from our principled pinnacles though, didn't we?

AllenKids 15y ago

Wow, just wow. Guess people really like pirates then, of course, this is Hacker News after all.

hannesfostie 15y ago

What Dustin did, is build a blogging engine he wanted to use himself. He then invited people he respected to write on the platform, people he knew would deliver a certain standard of quality that he'd love to connect his name to. He never said the platform would never be opened, in fact it looked like he might do just that some day. What you did was not just use a concept (add idea to list, expand on it and then publish it when ready), you just took his entire design and published it to the public. Taking a concept and opensourcing it is fine, copying a design and mocking the original creator is not. As much as I'd like to use Dustin's blogging engine (it's the way I'd like to write), I will never use yours out of principle.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
...mocking the original creator is not. Where did Nate mock Dustin, or even speak negatively about him? Reading his post I find only one mildly negative comment: "I felt Dustin missed out on what have been a great open source contribution."
- hannesfostie 15y ago
  I assumed that's why he got the name wrong. He edited it after I wrote the comment, I suppose it was a genuine mistake. Still doesn't change how I feel about this. He could have opensourced the engine on itself, taking the design as well is a blatant ripoff. Another thing is this: The goal is simple: when you see the Svbtle design, you should know that the content is guaranteed to be great. By stealing the design, he is completely boycotting Dustin at making this vision of his come true.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    The author has already changed the design in response to Dustin's criticism: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744438 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744438 I'd chalk the design similarity up to "I...typed in rails new obtvse, and a few hours later I'm here."
  - hannesfostie 15y ago

instakill 15y ago

It was only a matter of time, really.

flocore 15y ago

Github: "TODO: Kudos" Blogpost: "Kudos suck"

nwienert 15y ago
Thats the joke...

deanpcmad 15y ago

haha brilliant!

deleted 15y ago

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livebeef 15y ago

When the technical entry level to join the competition is too low, you _should_ expect clones. Copyright holds automatically on all the code, but just the idea of that kind of blog can't be considered a sufficient "level of creativity" to deserve copyright protection.

kveykva 15y ago

dcurtis' version is generally more attractive in my opinion, and honestly nwienert's site as a whole is less attractive than Dustin's. Even if it is copyright infringement, at least there's that I suppose.

fabfischer 15y ago

Copying ideas or products happens all the time. Some make a lot of cash with it: http://www.techberlin.com/post/19732590058/true-story-the-samwer-brothers-are-now-cloning-amazon http://www.techberlin.com/post/19732590058/true-story-the-sa...

ohsilly 15y ago

From Nate's twitter feed: "Become good at cheating and you'll never need to become good at anything else." Pretty much sums it up.

nwienert 15y ago
I stole that from Banksy ;) Check out some of my original work: http://gamegum.com http://gamegum.com http://bassdownload.com http://bassdownload.com http://vbseed.com http://vbseed.com http://webuildappsforyou.com http://webuildappsforyou.com ... Funny enough I wrote that before I had seen svbtle.
- ohsilly 15y ago
  The thing is Bansky does it with a touch more class. :)
syaz1 15y ago
Sorry, 160 characters taken out of context can mean both good or bad. No summing up there.

kveykva 15y ago

Maybe asking first might have been polite, is that a thing? :/

willvarfar 15y ago

We can all appreciate the pleasure Dustin got from perfecting his Svbtle design. His perfection of the authoring flow. Perfection is when there is nothing left to take out, after all. We can all thank Dustin for showing it to us so early. And we can all imagine how he wanted to build a quality brand with it, partly by vouching for the quality of those who use it. You could imagine that monetisation might have been in there too - a startup! We like startups here; we all applaud. We mustn't let Obtvse cheapen that.

davidw 15y ago
> startup Successful startups require a barrier to entry for competitors, more often than not.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  interesting point, not sure; on the social web its community adoption over technology every time
  - daeken 15y ago
    That is the barrier to entry. Take Tumblr for instance: mediocre tech (just going from experience as a user), but it has a massive community invested in it. That is the barrier to entry; anyone attempting to go up against Tumblr has to figure out how to build that community.

obilgic 15y ago

@dcurtis: > Not only did that guy completely rip off my work, but he did it badly, he put the code on Github, and he got my name wrong. What a jackass. > @natebirdman "Hey, I ripped off your work and put it on Github." Really?

mtkd 15y ago

I closed the original post as soon as I sampled the air of superiority that seems to be ever more present with some "intelligent, creative, and witty" developers and commentators. Hail the disruption.

NSElvis 15y ago

Dustin Curtis was a superhero.

camwest 15y ago

The thing he copied was already "open sourced" anyway the minute Dustin blogged about it to the world.

Achshar 15y ago

It's @dcurtis "concept" and let him decide, no matter how ethically wrong his decision is, its his' anyway. Copying the concept and releasing it is definitely not the right way of showing your discontent with his decision of not releasing his work to public. I have an app that is closed source (the kind of thing that you would expect to be opensource but i decided not to). If someone thought that it was better if it was open and copied the concept, UI/UX and released it, i would not be very happy. Community and open is all good and i am all for it but i intend to make a living out if it [my app] and won't be happy seeing it being released. I don't know how much of a work the platform really was but my app was alot of work. more than enough that i would enforce it's closed-source status.

driverdan 15y ago
I have 2 words for someone in that situation: tough shit. I can understand not liking new competition but that's business. Innovate, compete, or die.
- Achshar 15y ago
  but in such case innovation is not an option. if the other person can copy current app why can't he/she copy the innovation too?

kiwim 15y ago

Thank you for sharing it.

chj 15y ago

when replicate something, do not show off how fast you can build it, because it is just replication.

deleted 15y ago

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jeremymims 15y ago
I couldn't agree more. This is an utterly toxic set of circumstances. While YC is utterly brilliant, Hacker News is so full of haters that it's downright... uninspiring? What happened to being a supportive community that encouraged people to develop interesting things, helped one another, and could congratulate one another for our successes? Jealousy doesn't really look good on anyone and it's unfortunately become this community's defining trait.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  Someone clones a project after its introduced with neiner-neiner look how cool thus is and you can't have it... and this is reason to bag on all of HN? Or better yet, its a reason to abandon all of open source? Better go back to using IE. Have fun.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      Again, what does open source have to do with any of this? Designers steal from designers regardless of the openness of the back end or availability of unobfuscated CSS.
  - jeremymims 15y ago
    Of course I'm not giving up open source software (we use it in our YC backed startup). But the attitude of this community has changed since four years ago... for the worse. In the past, when someone submitted something to the community, they got feedback. Today we get mindless copying, downvoting of dissenting opinions, and rationalizations why it's a good thing to take people's work and then taunt them about it. I suspect this attitude will result in good people backing away from HN and it will definitely reduce the positive exchange of ideas. It's not just "not nice", it's mean. And it's the opposite of the experience that I had at YC and continue to have with YC founders. There's a spirit of camaraderie and helpfulness that's almost completely lacking in this thread and has been present in every story about a startup being acquired. In a way, it's very un-YC. I'm not sure how useful a community like this is to people who create things and want to share them with others. The Haters have stormed the gates and have taken over. When's the next time you think Dustin will share a valuable or interesting concept he's working on?

reason 15y ago

Guys, if someone dangled something in front of you with the initial impression that you could have one, and you wanted it, only later to find out that you actually can't have it and that those who could have it are "intelligent and witty", implying that you are not, then I think it's pretty safe to say that you'd run home, cook something similar up and run back to show that you have one now too. In fact, after reading the original article, I felt a bit slighted and thought to myself "fine, I'll just build it myself".

54mf 15y ago
Your metaphor is wholly flawed. This would be like if you wanted to get in to a restaurant because of the great food, decor, and excellent ties the waiters were wearing, but couldn't get in. So you went next door and created your own restaurant with the same recipes, decor, and ties on the waiters, but let anyone in. Building something with similar functionality is one thing; building a stem-to-stern carbon copy is just low class.
- reason 15y ago
  So, what's wrong with that? I'd eat at the second restaurant in a heartbeat if getting into the first is too much of a hassle. You would too.
  - 54mf 15y ago
    You make an awful lot of assumptions about how others would act. I definitely wouldn't eat at the second restaurant, because they'd be scumbags for ripping off the first restaurant and I wouldn't want to support them. Exclusivity is not a license to, nor a justification for, outright copying.
    - reason 15y ago
      Right, so if I built an Augusta National for the public, I'd be considered a scumbag.

DanBC 15y ago

(http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/pirated/ http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/pirated/) Mentions this screenshot: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliotjaystocks/516412232/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliotjaystocks/516412232/) See also the (now dead, unfortunately) pirated sites. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/) (http://www.pirated-sites.com/ http://www.pirated-sites.com/)

Permit 15y ago

Dustin Curtis' outraged seems somewhat bizarre for someone whose blog/Twitter logo is an obvious rework of the Flash logo: https://www.google.ca/search?q=flash+dc&hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1C1SNNT_enCA471CA471&biw=1538&bih=839&tbm=isch&tbs=simg:CAESEgmXdw-T4So2QiFAmAs61EEH2w https://www.google.ca/search?q=flash+dc&hl=en&safe=o... https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1902246181/logo10.png https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1902246181/logo10.png Not that I fault either designer. I think they've both taken previous work, improved upon it (or at least altered it), in some way before releasing it as their own. I suppose I have trouble feeling sorry for Dustin after reading he planned to open it up to those he thought worthy of its use.

54mf 15y ago
How is Obtvse, in any way, an improvement upon or alteration of Svbtle? As far as I can tell, it's a 1:1 clone, but "open".
- Permit 15y ago
  It's not a 1:1 clone. Put them side by side and you'll quickly see differences in font choice and size as well as positioning of several elements. I'm not saying it's not similar, but it's certainly not a clone. And I'd like to think that being open-source is a huge feature of Ovbtuse, and something certainly worth noting when comparing the two.
  - 54mf 15y ago
    Okay, perhaps not a 1:1 clone, but definitely a rip-off. Mr. Wienert posted examples of his other work in this thread, and I think it's safe to assume he wouldn't have come close to the Svbtle UI if left to his own devices.
    - unalone 15y ago
      Seriously? It's a two-column interface with extra heaps of whitespace and thick borders. Yeah, Obtvse imitates Svtble – that's the point. It's not like it was imitating anything especially unique or difficult to conceive.

J3L2404 15y ago

This kerfuffle is amusing on a site that believes copyright violation is a moral imperative.

jcdreads 15y ago
Without addressing the merits of either copyright or patent protection, I believe you're confusing the two. Folks around here tend to believe that software patents are bad; the view that copyright is bad is less widely shared. In fact, open source licenses /rely/ on the protections afforded by copyright law.

athst 15y ago

I think that there's a distinction to be made between copying code and copying design. Design is hard, and even though a design might be quick to implement in code, that doesn't mean the design was easy. Just look at the Samwer brothers - they clone every good startup that comes out. Is what they do okay? Maybe they don't copy any of the code from the successful site, but they shamelessly copy the design, which is often the hardest part of the creation process and the main reason why the original site was so successful in the first place.

itsmicks 15y ago
Didn't see this and brought up the Samwers as well. I think we're still in a transition around here in terms of how "design" is valued but overall it seems like things are improving.

madasahatta 15y ago

copycats are not cool cats

ForrestN 15y ago

Those who are talking about this as if the design and concept are just being stolen are acting, well, obtuse. Wienert is not trying to pass this off as his own work. He's not selling it. It's a few things, all at once: first, and foremost, it's a parody, skewering the absurd arrogance of the original presentation; it's a generic drug, making something which sure seems to be exclusive for bad reasons and making it accesible; and it's a good example of someone taking matters into their own hands. Wienert was told something wasn't available to him because he's not witty enough, so he went and built it for himself. To compare this to someone stealing someone's intellectual property malevolently for personal gain is missing the point.

irahul 15y ago
> Wienert is not trying to pass this off as his own work. He's not selling it. He can pass this off as his own work and sell it for all I care. I don't know who created the first blogging engine, but do you believe all subsequent blogging engines owe something to the first one, and shouldn't have re-implemented and sold it without making it substantially different?
- ForrestN 15y ago
  No, and I probably agree with you, but I'm just trying to point out that you don't have to subscribe to what appears to be a more controversial idea (that copying and possibly selling a piece of software is OK) in order to support what Wienert has done.
- rokhayakebe 15y ago
  A guy who makes a new chair doesn’t owe money to everyone who ever built a chair.

cjbprime 15y ago

Dumb technical question: What's the purpose of the "Aside" flag in Obtvse? I can see that it sets a class for CSS, can't see an equivalent in the Svbtle UI.

dewiz 15y ago

A blogger discover "drafts". He shares the idea only with VIPs. I'll use Gmail drafts.

alpb 15y ago

Anyone thinks to create a WordPress Theme out of this design? That would be huge.

alpb 15y ago
Ok, one of my friends started working on open source wordpress theme design that clones this design. (as much as it can) in first version, we'll omit comments (listing and posting) then maybe we can add. I'll let you know over HN.

funkah 15y ago

I'm sick of that invite-only horseshit too. If you're gonna share it privately don't announce it to the world. Don't wave a steak in front of my face and then walk it over to the VIP section. I don't care if this is petty, I am serious as a heart attack about it now. I refuse to use Google+ for this reason, and a couple other things too.

itsmicks 15y ago

It's pretty clear that the innovation in Dustin's work wasn't the code -- it was the interface. Pointing out that Nate built Obtvse in a day from scratch is pretty meaningless and the fact that he bothered to recreate it makes it pretty clear that Dustin built something cool. As a designer... it just feels like this wasn't Nate's to open source and hopefully this will transition further from the original. On the flipside, if the Samwer brothers launched a version of Svbtle next week in 15 markets, would the reaction be the same?

jasonlotito 15y ago
> It's pretty clear that the innovation in Dustin's work wasn't the code -- it was the interface. What part? While it looked pretty, I didn't see anything new or unique (outside of the liking mechanism he uses).
- itsmicks 15y ago
  Perhaps I'm not familiar, but what CMS/blogging engine looks like his and is structured like his (esp in the admin)?
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    The list of articles/ideas/drafts? The full screen editing mode? Which part? I'll grant him the UI is new, but in essence, it's a skin over existing concepts. And, to be clear, when I say UI, I'm referring to the the colors and graphics. Sort of like someone coming up with a new theme for Firefox. You still have the form of a browser, just with different colors, padding, and images. So again, I pose my question, where is the new, unique, non-obvious innovation here? You seem to have some interest in defending this idea, so maybe you can answer this. I'm not a designer, so clearly, I might be missing something. Edit: Just to be clear here, for one example, was when I saw his distraction free writing screen, it reminded me of the countless other implementations I've seen for other blogging platforms, not to mention what's built into Word and Pages (with Word's being far more elegant).

rounak 15y ago

One word: sense of entitlement

cletus 15y ago

While I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of people who have their work ripped off, I can't muster a sense of outrage here. Fact is, one guy cloned what was a closed platform (that had been openly announced and displayed) based on the idea and screenshots alone in about 11 hours (based on the HN submission interval). If someone can do that--and does--you really haven't invented or created anything (substantive). This just leaves the issue of whether the design and the assets (CSS, images, etc) are substantive and have been used without permission. Based on other comments, there seems to be no issue of asset "theft". So does the minimalist design copy warrant outrage? Honestly, no. Someone has basically invented what amounts to a Wordpress theme. If dcurtis can create a scalable, reliable platform for hosting it then great. It worked well enough for Wordpress. Exclusivity and invite-only are time-honoured ways of scaling controllably and--let's be honest--creating hype and desire but if you're not ready for the copycats and it takes the copycats so little time that their HN submission makes it to the front page while yours is still there... that's your problem.

dangoldin 15y ago
I'd make a counterpoint. It probably took Dustin years to get to the skill level he's at now. Most of the work here was in the design and "ideation" stage rather than the CSS/HTML/JS. Once something is built it only requires the necessary tech skills to copy it. Reminds me of a story about Picasso: A woman asks Picasso to paint a painting of her, five minutes later there's a wonderful painting of her. When she asks Picasso how much she owes, he quotes her 5,000 francs. She's surprised by how much it is and tells him that it only took him 5 minutes. He responds with "No, it took me my entire life." This is an extreme comparison but I just want to highlight that there's a value to the experience that people have. As hackers we tend to underestimate that since we focus on the more visible tech skills.
- loceng 15y ago
  Sadly ideas aren't valued in the business world, only execution is promoted as the important part - so people trying to make profit can feel less guilty.

brettbergeron 15y ago

Sorry if I missed it, but it looks like the real victim of plagiarism would be: http://drawar.com/ http://drawar.com/ Honestly, nothing about the design or user experience of Svbtle was unique. There have to be more examples, at least by coincidence, of other designs that show prior use of similar typography and layout. So really, this whole debate of originality seems moot.

ux_designer 15y ago

Dustin Curtis didn't create a blogging platform, he created another PR and traffic grab. Which is great for his career and visibility. But come on, the only way this could get any more farcical is if Dustin revealed that he orchestrated this whole thing and is in fact both parties. If I were Dustin, I'd be ecstatic that I'd almost permanently glued to the front page of HN. Any publicity is good publicity.

zachallia 15y ago
i hope he is both parties, that would be pretty epic
Androsynth 15y ago
Nice conspiracy theory, but why would his main persona act like such a bumbling fool while his foil persona gets the respect? and a large amount of hate, but the scale is tipping mostly in his defense

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Stratego 15y ago

If you want to roll your own, don't steal the man's hard design work if you're going to plagiarize his concept anyway. Dustin is often quite cocky, but I don't wish this kind of mindless copying on anyone.

stevewilhelm 15y ago

If anyone is looking for "prior art" for Obtvse or Svbtle should look at Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal implements multiple columns of one line ideas, in Pivotal's case they are features or bugs instead of blog posts.

nchlswu 15y ago

I find it fascinating the disdain people have for Dustin because of his attitude (which is pretty consistent if you follow him) and how he presented Svbtle. Clearly he was sharing some concepts and ideas that he felt were worth sharing and may be useful to colleagues in the industry. But because of (perhaps too 'arrogant') copy and the fact that Dustin didn't want people to use it for the time being, a significant portion of this 'community' felt compelled to simply rip off his work in to spite him. I don't get it. Without getting into the merits of when stealing something is justifiable why is such maliciousness so 'justified' to some in this case?

littlemerman 15y ago

Thank you.

caublestone 15y ago

This is awesome, and a great step past the "Poker blog" you were running back in High school :P.

iamwil 15y ago

I wouldn't worry about it too much were I Dustin. He'll keep continually improving Svbtle from his design insights, whereas Obtvse likely will stagnate. And if it doesn't, the contributors would all be programmers, given it's hosted on github. Chances are, they won't use it often, and they won't have the design intuitions that come with design experience and use. Take it as a form of flattery and just move on. I have faith in his design chops.

Androsynth 15y ago
This is an excellent point! Design is supplementary to a good product. But theres so much more to a good product than design. If Obtvse is more popular than Svbtle in the long run, it will be because Dustin himself failed, not because the design was copied. He's already made the wrong decision at every major point imo.

xbryanx 15y ago

My Dad always said the best place to open a new suit store is right next door to the oldest, most established suit store in town.

samstave 15y ago

This is a really interesting circumstance. On the one hand, I don't think the Obtuze is a theft of Subtle -- however I talk crap about Zynga's idea theft (based on look feel UX mechanics etc) all the time. While this is a reverse of Zynga's for profit thievery - this is a "Robin-Hooding" of sorts (taking a closed shiny widget and making an open shiny widget. Ill withhold judgement in this case as i feel it would make me a hypocrite.

jamesjyu 15y ago

Dustin Curtis should really be a marketing/pr person, specifically aimed at startups.

huhtenberg 15y ago

A thing to keep in mind - dcurtis is building a business. A high-profile high-traffic no-nonsense blogging site is a very valuable asset - be it for the purpose of direct advertisement, product placements/mentions or as an acquisition target. Positioning it as exclusive and coming across as arrogant is actually a sensible marketing approach. The design is only a part of the deal, but it's the content that really matters. Cloning the design is surely not without consequences, but in a larger picture it's not that big of deal.

srik 15y ago

It is NOT what the author of thisSvbtle wanted done with his project. He explicitly stated that it wasn't ready for the punlic yet and would be available when he worked things out. He might have seemed smug, but Im apalled that bulk of the HN community seemed seemed to be OK with someone essentially copying his project outright. Im not able to frame my answer better but this is not how how mutually respecting communities are built.

tworats 15y ago

Putting aside the morality of this particular case, I'd point out that this type of copying will discourage early sharing of concepts / projects on HN, which is not a good thing.

cheald 15y ago
Counterpoint: If your idea can be fully replicated in 11 hours as an experiment, your idea might not be all that defensible/sustainable in the first place.

shubsengupta 15y ago

As both a designer and a programmer, I'm (oddly enough) in support of obtvse and the thing behind it. Sure, it looks fairly similar, but the 'magic' like the kudos system and the pretty like CSS features that set the two apart are enough for me to distinguish between the original and the clone. From the first article I read on dcurtis' site, I noticed the simplicity to the design and really liked it. When I started to read the article yesterday about his svtble network, I thought to myself, 'sweet, I can finally use this.' And then I got to the last line, and all that went away. I don't like exclusivity, and while the idea behind the 'every time you see this theme it will feature great bloggers' thing was good, I felt like he could have very easily made a stripped down version of the theme that differed a bit from the 'premium model' for the general public to adopt. Or perhaps not even the ‘general public’ but rather one to just release within Hacker News, a (if I make a generalization) smarter than average community. Kudos (pardon the reference) to Nate for churning out some good code in a very short amount of time. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes on from here, and how the two will deal with it.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

This is pretty decent example of the entitlement syndrome I see in the design/development community. We somehow feel like all cool things should be free (as in liberty) and open source and shared, hacked, modified, and improved. And that's great! But when someone comes around with something cool that isn't all of those things like Dustin Curtis did and someone else subsequently clones it, we feel differently all of the sudden. Why is that? We all love StackExchange but when an open source clone came out about a month ago a lot of people were screaming "rip off!" Why? It's really hard to judge when a clone is in poor taste and when it's acceptable. It's an interesting question. If I were judge I'd say Obtvse is perfectly legit. If Svbtle were for everyone then I'd say the clone is in bad taste but it really was only matter of time before someone brought it to the masses so long as the original would never be offered to the rest of us. But that's beside the point. I just think its so interesting that a group of people who demand their music and media free just because they can, and extoll the virtues of (F)OSS, demanding our software be free and throwing massive tantrums when a developer of anything cool or useful doesn't publish the source can turn around and say a clone of a piece of software that's limited to a certain group is now not okay. This can be an IP issue and it's so interesting how we put ourselves in the other guy's shoes so selectively. Copyright, IP, etc. are the root of all evil one day but are useful and need to be considered the next. Maybe I'm missing something but I find popular opinion on this stuff funny at times. This isn't an indictment of dcurtis or the creator of Obtvse. I personally think both are awesome, I love that Obtvse now exists (because I would never be invited to use Svbtle), and I think both developers are just plain awesome. For me, it's just really interesting to see how one action is wrong (along the lines of theft or infringement) but another in the same vain is seen as justified by the same people. Maybe I'm the dumb guy in the room but I see some cognitive dissonance here.

dreamdu5t 15y ago

By D. Curtis' own logic he ripped of the design of http://cargocollective.com/ http://cargocollective.com/

evertonfuller 15y ago

I'm just struggling to see what's so 'revolutionary' about the design. It's just a bland minimalist modern theme. Anyone could have made it. Dustin's response was just plain rude, let's recap: "This is almost unbelievable. No matter what you think about me or my product decisions, it is flatly wrong to ripoff work. It's shameful, even. Please take this site down and delete the Github repository. The work isn't yours. Just wait until Svbtle is finished and open to the public. The reason it's closed is really simple: it's not ready yet." Get over yourself.

farinasa 15y ago

I posted this in the other thread, but I feel it's worth repeating: I'm sorry, but isn't this just a reversion to late 90's style frame design? It seems all you've done is build it in the latest trendy standards and add a few little CSS tricks. Minimalist design is supposed to be about presenting the content first and foremost. But the content is overshadowed by your frame. Your name and flashy CSS tricks are the only constants on the page and take up nearly 25% of the view, but you claim you're trying to draw attention to the content? Perhaps if the content you're presenting is you, then you have a successful design. Of course this version removes the CSS stuff but I think my point stands.

woodall 15y ago

I really love the hover-to-trigger buttons and think DC had a great product. Why rush him to push it to market.

mustafaakin 15y ago

No one is mad at Steve Jobs, when he says "good artists copy, great artists steal", but when it comes to these guys, they are just criminals? I support that theme, minimalism is always good.

skeletonjelly 15y ago

I felt the exact same feelings as the writer when I was reading about it's growing interest. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742647 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742647 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3737549 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3737549 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3731095 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3731095 This was until I saw Dustin say he was going to open the platform up to the public. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742596 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742596 But congrats on going to all that effort to copy one of the most minimalistic blog designs ever. Maybe Dustin should have made it more obvious what his intentions were on the homepage.

mkramlich 15y ago

Then there's how us old farts blog: vi something ...run script to maybe apply template, regen indices... ...preview locally in browser... ...maybe edit again... ...run script to upload (if want to "publish"), commit to VCS, etc... no fancy codebase needed. no web framework, no local web server, no reinventing the wheel, etc. and the same tools used above to "blog" are also used to do lots of other productive things, so leverages the same skill set, exercises the same muscle memory, and more future-proofed.