It's not a bad thing at all. I was hoping to convey your point about being able to tell where ideas come from but maybe I didn't so well. Its one thing to stea

It's not a bad thing at all. I was hoping to convey your point about being able to tell where ideas come from but maybe I didn't so well. Its one thing to steal an idea, use it as-is, remix it, whatever. That's fine. What's wrong is taking an idea and implementing it in a completely identical way. Like if someone took the source for MS Office, compiled it and just rebranded it then that's obvious theft. Of course the idea of a desktop publishing suite isn't something that can be stolen. There's a million ways to clone MS Office as far as the source is concerned so it's not theft so long as your implementation is unique to you. That's what I was getting at here. And the other thing is that I don't know if any law really could cover the kind of situation the article is about. It's just one of those things that's easy to spot when it's presented but hard to codify and describe.