I couldn't disagree more unless you want to clarify in greater depth what an "idea" is. People who think of ideas as property are literally the personification of selfishness. Their anti-altruistic thought is a stunt to creativity. We are were we are today scientifically/culturally because of the continued improvement of other people's ideas and research.

If you submit an idea, it immediately becomes public domain and can and should be copied or replicated if it can be made better and more open for the benefit of society. (To my regret), I studied law and spent as much time as I could in Intellectual Property because it was the most interesting field to me; what I learnt from my studies is how broken the entire system is.

If you are offended when someone steals you idea, then you should go invent your own internet. With blackjack, and hookers. Because ultimately, you are only where you are because of the contributions that other people have made, and if something can be clones in 11 hours, from svbtle to obtuve, then all it is is an idea.

Steal ideas, copy them, make them better, and encourage EVERYONE to pay it forward by pushing up the bar of expectations.

* =

Edit:

I came across some idea a while ago, I can't remember what it was called, something about "boycott commits", or along those lines.

The general premise is that every time you ever touch a file, you have to make it better in some way.

If you are going to do a commit to some open source project, you should make it better. Either by commenting something with more verbosity, or by optmizing how the project handles some ternary condition.

It's up to you, just make it better.

Now, imagine the entire world is an open source project, we are all in it together, we might all be running our own branches, but we all work from the same code base. When you commit you have a good chance of making my fork better too!

Want a more tangible example? Google and Facebook.

Whether or not you want to believe it, Google and Facebook are each making themselves better by copying and competing each others ideas. Google started out by looking at what Facebook had, and spotting what they are missing out in.

They then spent time developing features to fill these gaps.

They came up with Circles. They came up with Hangouts. They came up with high resolution pictures. They up with FooBar.

Well, now, Facebook came up with lists, Facetime, and recently included high resolution pictures. Whether you agree or not, this competition is all benefiting us.

So what if Obtvse copied an idea. Lets hope that is spurred dcurtis into making his platform "better".

I empathize with what you're saying, and in this case the notion of "stealing an idea" was a bit more blatant than most, but I still think two versions of Svbtle is better than one.

Let's look at some positives of what the clone did: 1) It generated buzz for both sites. And forced people to consider this idea as a legitimate product, instead of a weekend hack. 2) It validated the market. More people doing similar things suggests there's a valid space there. 3) Provided that both sites continue to operate and grow, they will continue to push eachother to do better.

I don't think the fact that the core product was copied is discouraging at all. I think it helps. I think the real problem you have is the manner in which it was copied. You nailed it with this line: "Real creative comes from a personal connection to a project or idea." <-- this is true. If the idea started with you, and you have the passion to continue executing on it, you'll stay the long haul and it will become a great product, it's your baby. Why does it matter what else is in the market? Shipping a product is half the battle - especially when you're dealing with space where there's no proprietary technology powering the product. Where real differentiation occurs is marketing execution, and that's where innovation is forced to occur.

Children get upset when someone copies from them. Adults realise that there's no such thing as an original idea, but there is such a thing as validated product-market fit.

The 99c vampire romance novels on the Kindle Store don't undermine Stephanie Meyer, they reinforce her status as a thought leader. The waves of Apple-derived industrial design (here's looking at you, HP Envy!) entrench the status of Jony Ive as the only designer that matters. Counterfeit designer clothes and accessories are the reason that luxury department stores in London are now employing Mandarin-speaking staff.

If you're not delighted that people are ripping off your ideas, you've badly misunderstood the modern market. On the internet, the worst thing you can be is ignored. Imitation means that not only is your idea good enough to notice, but that it's good enough to slavishly copy. The clones might get a few hits or a few bucks, but the social capital is all yours.

Everything's fair in love, war and business.

Ideas are meant to be "stolen". That's how progress is made. If you want to protect your idea, make sure that you've got the best execution. There is no benefit for society from protecting subpar executions.

This makes no sense at all. Ideas should be copied, redistributed, and refined by multiple parties. The execution best matched with its audience and context will do well. This post suggests that it is somehow not right for a person to draw inspiration from the work of others and then do the work independently to realize the idea. Why should I have to ask permission to access any idea or to do work by myself?

I truly believe in taking the core concept of an idea and making it better -- if companies and start ups lag behind and leave room for innovation, why not capitalize on it?

If a company is always progressing and improving upon it's product or service, then this leaves less room for people to come in and steal their idea and "improve" upon it. Even if there are copycats that come into the market and try to improve upon the core concept, the fact that you're working to build upon your business inspires loyalty and reach among your base of users. I think it's these types of companies that are the hardest to compete with, making stealing their idea even tougher to execute.

A guy who implements a closed source idea as an open implementation usually ends up getting credit for taking the pain to implement the idea rather than coming up with the idea. The guys who created GNOME/KDE do not get credit for inventing the GUI. They get credit for making a usable opensource implementation of ideas that were born at XEROX PARC and even before that.

Anyone who creates a clone of a closed app is providing the starting point for derivative work. Even if the "first author" did nothing more than clone functionality, subsequent authors shall build new awesome features on top of that.

If you want to prevent OSS from getting in your way of making money, all you need to ensure is that you care about delighting customers. For Eg consider Google. they use android for controlling the platform on which search happens. The linux kernel hackers actually care very little about whether ur mom can use the phone. The non cool aspects of project get very little attention. To run a business, all you need to do is pay as much attention to the non cool parts of a project.

Apple still sells devices with huge margins. So all Dustin Curtis needs to do is "be the steve jobs" of his niche. He can make money off of it, if he chooses to, and get credit for what he creates true value from and the open implementations can co-exist.

I think the concept of "stealing an idea" itself is a sort of tribute to the person who originated it. But actually speaking ideas cannot be stolen.

What wiener did is commendable in its own right without taking any credit away from curtis.

But before this turns into a huge thing, please, come back to the ground. This blog idea or the style is pretty trivial. Its not as if this is linux or a programming language or anything like that.

Were I to be in curtis's position, I might feel like I should have been in control of all aspects of unveiling it to the public and noone must take any credit for anything. But then I would be childish now, wouldn't I?

Have we heard from curtis yet? Maybe his opinion is completely different than that of the article's author.

The value of dcurtis's idea was exclusive content from a carefully selected bunch of people. The (IMO ugly) design of the blog or the idea of the ideas panel are not valuable.

If dcurtis had announced his blog platform; announced his blog network; and released the code I think he would have had a very different response. But his approached trashed the "brand" that he wanted to protect. Just read the comments in anythread mentioning the two products; words like "dick" occur many times.

I've added an edit as of 2:45 PST. Thanks for reading and I appreciate the dialogue.