Poll: Have you ever "borrowed" other people's code/layout etc?

[vaksel]

Based on that other thread, where it turned out that Indinero stole Shopify's layout and copied it, pretty much, verbatim.

I was wondering if anyone else "borrowed" things(CSS, design elements, some javascript etc) in the past?

[paulgb]

I didn't vote, because neither really applies to me. I don't think anyone can claim that everything they do is completely original without being either ignorant or lying. Everything I do is influenced, subconsciously or consciously, by something I've seen before. So on that level, "everything I do is original" would be a lie for me.

At the same time, I've never "borrowed" anything directly by copy and pasting, with the exception of open-source code and always with copyright notices in tact. What Indinero did (it's not just the layout, another poster noted that the marketing copy is almost verbatim from Mint), though, is quite different from "borrowing" open source code. So I didn't feel like I should vote for that one either.

[forensic]

I think this poll has two options.

1. Yes

2. Comedy option that people only vote on out of sarcasm/irony

Everyone borrows. But there is some fine line where borrowing becomes plagiarism. Not everyone plagiarizes.

[stan_rogers]

At some level, I think that anyone who hasn't borrowed code (or layout, if you're a front-ender) can be fairly classified as an idiot. No, I don't approve of site-lifting or mindless copy-and-paste "development", but if you've never paid the sincerest flattery to a problem elegantly solved you're either pathologically incurious or pathologically obstinate.

On the other hand, passing off visual design without modification (other than, say, the logo) as your own work is rather less than honest. Using someone else's code without understanding it (and without being able to judge its merit as written -- and assuming it's not a part of a "you are not expected to understand this" library) is equally reprehensible, not so much from an IP point of view, but because you are making yourself out to be something you're not.

[warfangle]

Borrow, yes. Be inspired, yes.

But if I take some code/design and integrate it without fully understanding it (I'm discounting in this things which are meant to be used so- modules, plugins, and so forth) I feel like it's intellectually dishonest. Of course I won't understand fully in intricate detail the codestack of an apache module. But view-source is useful as a learning tool: how did they do it, how can I do something similar myself?

I'm at a point where examples like this give me a starting point for adapting a technique to my own uses. If I copy/pasted, not only would it be intellectually dishonest-when the customer requests something that would require the infringing block be modified, I'm doing q disservice to my customers: if I don't understand every inch of that code, I'll likely introduce a multitude of bugs and elongate development time unneccessarily compared to if I had written said code myself.

Disclaimer: mobile, +5 drinks.

[colbyolson]

That long of a reply from a mobile? I couldn't find the time to write that out unless I was sitting on the train/bus. Kudos.

[jamesbritt]

Yes, I did.

But I gave it back when I was done.

More seriously, how in the world can you do anything without some degree of aping others? "View | Source" gave us the Web we know today.

There's a difference, though, in a) glomming full implementations, and b) copying things because you like how they are done, understand how they work, and see little point in trying to "clean room" your own version just to get the same end results with "original" code.

Originality is overrated.

Giving credit makes the world a nicer place.

[jacquesm]

Let's turn that around, have you ever done anything at all that you thought was truly original ?

[vaksel]

well by original I mean, you wrote everything yourself. Sure you may have consulted other people for ideas, code samples, but you didn't just go to a site you liked, went into source, and copy pasted into your code

[forensic]

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

- Carl

[ct]

Most people "borrow" but hopefully have enough decency to change it enough to make it their own, or at least give credit where credit is due as long as the "borrowing" was allowed by the original property owner.

[Osmose]

Link to thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=988816

[wheels]

Sure. I think starting off looking around for sites you like and then doing something somewhat similar is fine. I don't think it gets sketchy unless you're trying to confuse customers or perhaps if you're knicking things off of a direct competitor.

When we did our redesign a while back we came up with a list of sites that we liked. The one we took the most from was frogmetrics, and you can still see notable similarities:

http://www.frogmetrics.com/

http://www.directededge.com/

(Notably, that's where I got the idea of having something interactive in the center-right.)

[mahmud]

I was planning to copy a CSS layout for the first time, ever, and I was going for Shopify's. I am not fucking kidding. It was either Shopify or this http://www.plenus.hr/?locale=en_US

See how similar the two sites are? I have been scoping them out for more than a month now :-/

What does it say about me when the one site I wanted to plagiarize is already in the news for being a victim of plagiarism? I am pretty much a Kansas teenage waitress who lost her virginity to Tiger Woods 2 weeks ago.

This is not cheating. It takes vision to clone others' work, mainly a vision over their shoulder.

[tsally]

There's a huge difference between copying some CSS and ripping an entire design. In the programming world, it's the difference between copying a C header file to do bit manipulation and stealing an entire program.

[chronomex]

It seems that you're coming at this from a "borrowing is bad" perspective.

Is it bad if I use code from a GPL'd project in my own GPL'd project? I used some code (about 100 lines) from Inkscape in something I wrote recently that needed to render SVG images into another format.

So, yes, I used someone else's work. They said that I could, and I credited them. (They actually used the algorithm from the SVG standard, but didn't cite it. Is that bad? If so, does the badness in that case transfer to me?)

[mikasissonen]

In my last year of school (1999), I created the web site for our journalism program's annual publication by mimicking the layout of Salon.com, which I liked because it had clean lines and its design was reasonably easy to recreate in Notepad.

From what I recall (and I hope a View Source of the HTML corroborates this), I didn't simply rip off the Salon.com HTML verbatim - instead, I first pasted in all the text I needed on each page, and then added the paragraphs, fonts, tables, and images by hand, because I didn't want to bring along any unnecessary scraps of code. I didn't know CSS at that time, so the HTML was really simplistic, to say the least.

Salon.com, circa 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/19990423201101/http://www.salon.c...

Langara Journalism Review, 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/19990528124312/http://www.langara...

[peterhi]

I tend to borrow little things rather than the whole. Sort of 'thats a nice effect - how do they do it', 'ooh that file upload progress looks nice, I could use that'

Which is when you find that they are just using a standard library that you have not heard of or some technique that the whole world and his dog already knows :(

[presidentender]

A good friend of mine just "borrowed" the CSS layout of my final CS project... for his final CS project. We're a year apart in graduation, and it's a different prof, and he recolored it.

Another good friend took my resume for the same class; some paragraphs are word-for-word, which is appropriate because our work and education is similar.

Really, I'm flattered.

[cabalamat]

Code - no

The odd Javascript one-liner - of course

HTML/CSS - yes, on occasion

Layout - of course. Mostly subconsciously.

[rwhitman]

I once designed a site where the client basically asked us to clone Etsy screen by screen, to the point where we were even using their copy and I had to majorly intervene (etsy has some major usability problems). Not like a little shady outfit either, celebrity ceo with plenty of VC too. Sickening. Needless to say they bombed HARD.

[julio_the_squid]

Ha, that's great. I'd love to know which site that was.

Really, Etsy doesn't have anything worth copying other than the basic idea and well, their success. Their copy and wording least of all... anytime there are words on the site, they are the wrong words.

[_srobertson]

"Borrowing" is essential for communication. We're using words right here that other people (well, civilizations) have standardized. At a certain level of granularity, all content is borrowed.

A more useful question might be, "what's the largest proportion of a work you have ever borrowed?"

[decadentcactus]

A small javascript function to work with AJAX (years ago, before jQuery), some minor css images (background fades etc since I didn't want to open photoshop just for that), the biggest thing is probably a layout inspiration, although that's changed a lot since the first time I borrowed it.

[albioner]

Do you really think the one you're borrowing from coded everything from scratch? So who do we credit in the end?

In any case, I mostly 'borrow' when I find an elegant solution to a problem I'm having, and always use it just as a starting point to get it right my way.