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Technically not difficult. But Sparrow does nothing that any other email client out there does - the great thing about it is its "feel".
by rahoulb 14y ago
Technically not difficult. But Sparrow does nothing that any other email client out there does - the great thing about it is its "feel".
- jiggy2011 14y agoWould the "feel" be difficult to reproduce? Maybe someone in a country unhindered by the DMCA could reverse engineering it and find whatever the secret sauce was.
- wpietri 14y agoThe DMCA isn't a problem; feel is hard to copyright. And if Google now owns the IP, they don't give two shits about suing somebody making a copycat app of something they abandoned. The problem is that good UI takes an absurd amount of work. It's the difference between painting a wall and painting a mural. With Sparrow to copy you'd have a good start, but you have to be enough of a UI devotee to even notice what makes a UI strong, and you'll still have to do a lot of user testing and polish.
- rmc 14y agoDMCA is not a problem. The code ie copyrighted. You cannot copy it without permission (which you don't have). You cannot legally "take it apart to look at the code" to build a derived work without permission (which you don't have). A country without the DMCA still has copyright law.