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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989120

by vaksel • 17 years ago

25 38 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

jacquesm• 17 years ago

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

vaksel• 17 years ago

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

alttab• 17 years ago

I voted yes for open source web site design, but those days are behind me.

I think he could have been referring to the copy-and-paste project mentality, where you learn just enough to copy and paste chunks of code and alter it until it works.

ismarc• 17 years ago

In trying to make it sound "less bad" you've confused what the real question is. It should have been "Have you every exploited the fact that something is publicly available for your own gain?" Take any design pattern (code design pattern). Now, there will be several variants on how to code it, but there will be millions of instances of nearly identical implementations, at least half of which started as a copy-paste (or type it nearly exactly the same from repetition, or copy paste from an earlier project, or reuse a file). To "borrow" in the term you describe, I could look at a site, and code something myself that looks exactly the same way, and it not be considered borrowing. However, it's still "taking" it.

Think of it like this...every single piece of code can be reduced down to a specialized chip that performs the same function. Did you create a chip that did exactly the same thing intentionally, or did you create a chip that did something different, or did you plug in their chip?

forensic2• 17 years ago

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

- Carl

Tim_M• 17 years ago

By 'borrow' does that mean to use the code etc to get something working then eventually re write those particular pieces yourself in a similar way that freebsd did or can they be kept for eternity.

_srobertson• 17 years ago

"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?"

mixmax• 17 years ago

Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal

Steve Jobs

wheels2• 17 years ago

That's much older than Steve Jobs. Igor Stravinsky said the same, and I'm pretty sure it's much older than him.

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

Well, he stole it.

grinich• 17 years ago

Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal -- Stravinsky

Real artists ship. -- Steve Jobs

tsally• 17 years ago

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.

wheels2• 17 years ago

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.)

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

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.

stan_rogers• 17 years ago

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.

Osmose• 17 years ago

Link to thread:

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

paulgb• 17 years ago

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.

presidentender• 17 years ago

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.

warfangle• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

rwhitman2• 17 years ago

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_squid2• 17 years ago

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.

rwhitman2• 17 years ago

Tell me about it...

Wish I could drop who it was but I'd rather not burn the bridge.

It was a ridiculous project, they had an India team that took the "just like Etsy" wording so literally that if I designed a screen that didn't look & function 100% identical to Etsy (ie: I improved it) they would have a hissy-fit. I have over a dozen emails that say "please revise to work like etsy.com. we can not move forward until design looks like etsy.com"

decadentcactus• 17 years ago

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.

forensic2• 17 years ago

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.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

Have you ever "borrowed" other people's natural/common language sentences? =)

auston• 17 years ago

I borrow this guy John Resig's code in pretty much all JS I write.

jeremyswank• 17 years ago

all of human cultural development (it seems to me) depends on borrowing what came before and adding your own differences to it. i even think it's possibly a generalizable pattern echoed in natural phenomena like language change and biological evolution. why should code be any different?

chronomex• 17 years ago

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?)

ct• 17 years ago

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.

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

I've borrowed and changed text around terms and conditions from a major business directory when I was creating one myself.

jv2222• 17 years ago

I would wager that just about EVERYTHING in literature, tech & art has been created by "Standing on the shoulders of giants"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_gi...

mikasissonen• 17 years ago

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...

mahmud• 17 years ago

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.

peterhi• 17 years ago

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 :(

cabalamat• 17 years ago

Code - no

The odd Javascript one-liner - of course

HTML/CSS - yes, on occasion

Layout - of course. Mostly subconsciously.

albioner• 17 years ago

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.

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

Related Stories