Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab has just written a blog post accusing Mozilla of plagiarizing the design of its FlightDeck editor. To make matters worse, Wilkinson says that MetaLab actually bid on creating the design for FlightDeck months ago, but was turned down by Mozilla.
While Wilkinson is understandably upset, at this point,it looks like the plagiarized image is just a mockup on the Mozilla wiki — not the actual product (though it’s obviously still in bad taste). We’ve reached out to Mozilla for a comment. You can see a screenshot comparison from Wilkinson’s blog post below.
Update: Here’s a comment from Mozilla, stating that the copy-and-paste design was a proof of concept:
Mozilla is now aware of a post by MetaLab that shows a Mozilla developer copying prior design work. The mockups they cite were an early proof of concept created by cut-and-paste, never final designs. Mozilla respects the hard work of all designers and at no time meant to plagiarize original content. The in-progress designs for the Jetpack SDK’s IDE are available here and following initial sign-off on the proof of concept, the IDE was developed entirely independent of MetaLabs’ work.
On its wiki, Mozilla describes FlightDeck as a tool to “enable the community to rapidly, collaboratively develop both extensions that utilize the Jetpack framework and Jetpack Capabilities crucial to the expansion of the Jetpack framework’s core.“
Update 2: Wilkinson has added the following update to his blog post:
I just got off the phone with the team at Mozilla, who apologized and clarified a few things. The design which used our site’s design elements was a development build and according to them the design has been changed in newer builds. That said, it was used in their launch video as well as their blog post announcing the product. They told me that that the team who put together the blog post and video was unaware of the similarities at the time of inclusion. We’ve asked for a public apology, and I’ll be doing a follow-up post tomorrow.
Congratulations on being TechCrunch’ed, Andrew Wilkinson! You just published to a lot of people that you’re one of the most difficult graphic design firms to work for!
uh no hes not difficult, hes protecting his work. id gladly work with someone who understands copyright laws
FF is currently the most popular browser.
If you want money, then accuse someone who is popular, to create buzz..
And we got Metalabs!
But it’s not like he accused them for no good reason – Mozilla completely ripped their design! He’s got every right to be upset and Mozilla should be ashamed of themselves.
As a webgeek, I immediatly checked the HTML of MetaLabs. Dumbasses. They verify its on their domain with one peice of code (deleted within seconds). After that, it’s smooth sailing. All the images, apis, etc are nicely linked to their server with HTTP links. They even explain HOW EVERYTHING WORKS. I mean, yeah, Mozilla was wrong but man, you guys need WAY better encryption.
Cheers and good luck to you guys!
Encryption…this is the Internet.
If I couldn’t find out how a site works if I wanted to, I’m on Microsoft’s turf.
Encrypting your HTML paralyzes your website for many users. Screen-readers cannot recognize text, browsers with disabled Javascript will encounter critical rendering issues, and your markup won’t pass W3C validation.
Anyone can view the source on 99% of websites, copy the markup, and create a carbon copy on their own server. Server-side functionality (PHP, Ruby, etc …) is a different story.
“webgeek” you are not.
Clear and well formatted markup is what we web developers strive for. Please post when you actually know something.
This is totally ridiculous and irresponsible of Mozilla. The design community is small and so many people know of Metalab’s work that I find it completely implausible someone at Mozilla didn’t personally OK this design knowing full well it was a rip-off.
Yup, it’s a blatant rip.
Just like Metalab’s design for their Ballpark app (http://www.getballpark.com/) is a poor rip off of the Campaign Monitor website (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/)
That doesn’t even look _close_ to a rip. hurp derp.
really? a rip? it’s look like the majority of iPhone app design.
iPhone app website design* showing off the iPhone app and etc.
They just have the same color scheme.
What I posted on Metalab’s blog:
“Check this out: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Labs/Jetpack/FlightDeck&action=history
It’s the page it’s on. You have to keep in mind that this is a wiki, and anyone with the rights to do so can edit it. Whoever this Dandonkulous is the one who uploaded the image and worked on the associated wiki page.”
Also, did you know that emotions are more heavily weighted than actual logic in reactions?
(Sorry if I sound like a troll–I just feel that there’s only one side to the story so far.)
Copying the layout positions and copying the layout images are completely different. Hundreds of websites use the same layout positioning of Techcrunch … but no legal, legitimate designer copies images—pixel for pixel—and republishes them as their own work.
What’s also in bad taste is designing mediocre Tumblr themes and selling them for $1000.
But I digress.
The designs do have a number of similarities. I would like to hear Mozilla’s side of the story about this.
Looks like an exact copy of the nav UI to me. Not cool.
“The designs do have a number of similarities. I would like to hear Mozilla’s side of the story about this.”
A number of similarities? Some of the graphics are straight up lifted from the MetaLab site. Some of the elements are just similar, they are 100% identical.
The fact that MetaLab bid on the design work for this project and their bid was turned down makes this all the more unseemly.
The design work for Mozilla may not have been done in house, but considering MetaLab bid on the project I would have expected those in charge at Mozilla who approved the project would have at least recognized MetaLab’s web site.
Mozilla and whoever produced this work should be ashamed of themselves.
Wow the comments here are the opposite of what’s being said on HN.
Mozillas reply is clearly an attempt to pacify rather than the truth. There are over a months worth of commits on the design, and back and forth on the colors, etc. Why would anyone bother with such small things as ‘a changed shade of gray’ on a proof of concept?
Lame, super, incredibly, lane.
Erm, those commits refer to the actual design – not the functionality mockup that this article is about (and was only uploaded once and never edited). You can see the real design here (use any username and password):
http://flightdeck.zalewa.info/ext_marcof/
Did anyone actually check Mozilla’s wiki page???
These were obviously just mock-ups for functionality…not design.
Here’s what the actual website looks like: http://flightdeck.zalewa.info
The wiki says any user/password will work.
OK. Now can somebody explain why this matters? We gonna have an IP fight about grey bars and grey squares. There are what, 1,000,000,000 websites – they all need to come up with original art?
What I mean is: shit, who cares.
BTW: pretty sure TechCrunch looks some other blog I saw.
There’s a difference between looking alike and copying. Someone worked hard to design the Metalab interface and the design was stolen.
Metalab homepage now redirects to http://blog.metalabdesign.com and rest of the nav links are not working anymore.
awilkinson and his ability to make his agency popular
A total rip-off. But come on, Mozilla, you could have ripped a good, outstanding design, not a lame, overused one that doesn’t communicate neither mean a thing.
These guys are ultra mediocre, and worst part is that they are damaging the web industry with their “interface design”.
Okay, so going forward to rectify the issue Mozilla should offer to pay MetaLabs the sum of the bid invoice to MetaLabs to save face and bury the hatchet. Done deal, moving on.
Seems these open source socialists really do have a problem to grasp the concept of property.
Sue ‘em!
The editor at http://flightdeck.zalewa.info/ looks totally different from the ones show in the pictures in this post (and it looks a lot worse IMHO). If there had been any rip off, it’s a past thing now.
Good post and comments.
Good for MetaLabs for defending themselves.
And good for Mozilla being so humble about it and admitting straight up.
The answer from Metalab is BS. They have never been any “builds” done by mozilla with these designs. Those were only mockups and were never materialized into builds.
likes that http://flightdeck.zalewa.info/ was designed by madebysofa.
i think that its their style
Metalab is a little premature on these accusations of plagiarism. Mozilla simply has an image on their WIKI that was shoped from a screenshot of Metalabs. They may have had some ground to stand on if Mozilla actually rolled out a site that looks identical.
Metalabs should have waited to see…
Just copying a good find from the MetaLab blog – the truth is in the github repo MetaLab! You’ve taken us readers and TechCrunch for a ride you pathetic liars!
—–
Are any of you even looking at the facts before you push post? Some Anon guy from last post was right on – if you just check the github commit log, in about 3 minutes you can see that there was never a single image, style, etc used in that product. Here’s what Anon said:
“Whole development of the flightdeck is open and published on github. Find a line of code or graphic which is following this “design” to keep your statement that this design was used in early builds. The way you handled it wasn’t right and everyone who spent 20 minutes on the subject before making a statement knows it.”
Andrew is apparently not skilled enough to check github himself and find out that nothing was ever used in any build or site. I would think you would do that be for making now proven false accusations like these:
From the first post: “The design which used our site’s design elements was a development build and according to them the design has been changed in newer builds.”
From this post: “…and recent Jetpack builds feature a new design.” – Jetpack, you mean FlightDeck? You can’t even keep the Mozilla products strait that you are making false statements about Andrew. LOL
I think Andrew didn’t want to check out all the facts so he could pull this stunt. The truth appears to be that someone used the MetaLabs homepage design to cut and paste in examples of how they wanted the site to WORK and what it should DO, not how it should LOOK. It is kind of dumb that they chose MetaLabs as their mock-up background, but it is clear that they had no intention of using that in anything else. (Mozilla please give MetaLabs credit or something next time, I’m sure after this you will never forget to!)
Good for Anon for checking the commit logs on this open source project, I should have done so earlier. This whole ugly situation was manipulated by Andrew, shame on you. I hope Mozilla sets the record strait.
—–