Published on: 2024-10-30
Written by Nathan
largely inspired by Copying (is the way design works)
There are many reactions to seeing your worked copied - it might be like Steve Jobs who said he would spend his dying breaths taking down Android because it was a copied product. Or when he tried suing Samsung for copying him by selling a rectangular device with rounded corners. Maybe it is like Hal Abelson, and the other creators of the creative commons license - you want your work to be copied and shared.
From software, to chairs, to art, to science, copying is pervasive. Herman Miller chairs are copied for cheaper (providing more for less is what the original creators of the Eames chair wanted anyways right?), John Carmack copied frame by frame Super Mario Bros 3, Van Gogh copied HiroShige. From my perspective, copying is just the creative process. Nothing is created in a vacuum. Everything you touch is derivative of something else and that is ok. How else can we improve? Take a good design and make it better, what else is there to do?
You may think this almost identical to the linked blog post - and you would be right.