It's a very fine line in software. For starters, I'd like to think as an industry we're still to a large extent driven by altruism, and as such the contributions we make to the overall landscape are valuable regardless of the value we can extract from them.
But it's also a fine line because this industry runs on copying. Iterative design, cross-pollination from others' best practices, UX commonalities, the list goes on.
A few things stand out to me, though:
His product now has 5 times as many users as mine. He used my idea, my design.
This implies that the product you created is inferior in some other ways - even if it's just the marketing. Ultimately, they ran with it and made it work better. We can argue about the moral imperative here, but at the end of the day, Amazon and Apple exist because of situations like this one.
But I also know that mine is obviously better (cause he ripped it off) and I’m the one who came up with the original idea.
This is a dangerous train of thought. While I don't doubt that your product may have a technological edge, it's not a healthy approach to raise one's own work to such heights - even without people copying it. Constructive criticism can easily start to feel like an assault on the work you put in, for example.
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It's a very fine line in software. For starters, I'd like to think as an industry we're still to a large extent driven by altruism, and as such the contributions we make to the overall landscape are valuable regardless of the value we can extract from them.
But it's also a fine line because this industry runs on copying. Iterative design, cross-pollination from others' best practices, UX commonalities, the list goes on.
A few things stand out to me, though:
This implies that the product you created is inferior in some other ways - even if it's just the marketing. Ultimately, they ran with it and made it work better. We can argue about the moral imperative here, but at the end of the day, Amazon and Apple exist because of situations like this one.
This is a dangerous train of thought. While I don't doubt that your product may have a technological edge, it's not a healthy approach to raise one's own work to such heights - even without people copying it. Constructive criticism can easily start to feel like an assault on the work you put in, for example.