We already knew that the main browsers on the market tended to inspire each other. Everyone seems to play the game we put together the best software. But there are times when the border between inspiration and plagiarism is far too vague. So the designers of the Canadian firm MetaLab accuse the developers of the Mozilla Foundation have simply stolen their work.
This week we talk about the first SDK for JetPack. This loads including the development environment FlightDeck for writing extensions for Firefox as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Precisely FlightDeck the core of this controversy. In a note titled ironically MetaLab password to open source?, Web developer Andrew Wilkinson explains that Mozilla has not only inspired the design of its website but has just recovered images to incorporate into the interface FlightDeck. Before the facts, in December, MetaLab have even contacted the developers by sending a quote to create the interface FlightDeck. This was rejected by the foundation.
The agency Metalab was particularly chosen to design the GUI of Songbird, the website of Harvard University or that of MTV. The team of Mr. Wilkinson has also helped develop ten iPhone applications. On the blog of Mozilla Labs, the developer Chris Beard published his apology saying: "Although our plans for the graphical interface does not include these elements, we integrated the first concepts inadvertently in our ticket and our video presentation . Since the images of these concepts have been removed from the site.
This is not the first time we observed this kind of practice. In December the startup Plurk China had accused Microsoft of stealing its interface to the board within a service called MSN Club.
