Not copying existing ideas is the strangest thing to me. What is the point of spending months trying to come up with an original design, instead of just taking a proven design and improving on it / customizing it to your companies virtues?
In the fintech space I've seen so many startups hire designers to come up with original new designs and user experiences, only to arrive at the exact same design as existing fintech apps.
What is the point of refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants? Pride?
It's not black and white, but cloning a product is just not nice. The legality is probably fine, there might be an argument for copyright infringements, but unlikely to get any result.
Imo it's also good to realize in this kind of software, patterns and UI are very core to the product, so you are copying the essence of what this company has spend tons of time and resources to develop. Fintech might be different as it's less about UI.
Then there is also a difference between UI patterns and branding. The first: It's good to follow standards and expectations, the second should just not be copied imo.
Another factor is asking money for it, which it looks like they intent to do. I think that makes it even weirder to clone an existing product as now you try to compete and profit from other peoples work.
There is a fine but clear line between inspiration and copying, and imo this crosses the line.
Even if legal I would not use this product for that reason, and imo it reflects poorly on the people doing it.
> It's not black and white, but cloning a product is just not nice.
Not only is it perfectly fine, it's the only way for competitive markets to function.
Copyright, patent, and trademark laws demarcate the boundaries within which we aim to guarantee enough protection to incentivize investment in truly unique innovations, but outside of those boundaries, we want markets converge to common product standards and establish category-wide conventions. That enables continuous marginal innovation without each entrant having to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.
I'm not sure anyone, Apple included, is better off today because they managed to shut down GEM and ended up killing Digital Research. I'm not sure anyone, AT&T included, would be better off today if the BSD and GNU projects and Linus Torvalds had never aimed to create clones of Unix.
Creating FOSS clones of commercial products is where much of the foundational modern software came from, and forking existing projects to add your own features is an essential element of FOSS software.
You're naturally free to eschew this project for the reasons you cite, but I don't think your opinion establishes good general principles. Markets, technology, and society as
a whole function precisely because people do copy what works from each other and add then add their own innovations incrementally.
Fully agree with the point that branding should not be copied. I should have been more clear but my comment pertains mainly to UI and UX of a product. If you're copying branding (something that offers no functionality, just style), that is just a dick move.
Amen. This is somewhat reductive, but you need to identify the problem your users are trying to solve, look for similar examples in the wild, and commit to one you like. Avoid reinventing the wheel to satisfy your ego unless the product truly requires it.
Well, I believe everyone is following on the Tailwind Template UI designs with Neumorphic-ish patterns these days. For instance, check these templates and tell me you haven't stumbled on new Startups launches these days with strikingly similar designs.
Personally, I'm perfectly fine as long as they are pleasing to look and nice to use.
I don't know about IP, but Linear is a web app and company that is not broadly open source, not even open-core, and is not something presented as something the user can self host.
sorry, you seem to be right. I got confused by their github presence which despite the name, doesn't contain their product.
https://github.com/linear/linear
