When big people steal small guys ideas

I was reading some of the posts on the top three contest by dailyblogtips.com. One that caught my attention was 3+1 things bloggers should never ever do

• Stealing others content
• Being rude to your commenter
• Posting invalid facts
• Stealing others ideas

The stealing others ideas has a great example of how Adobe aka 500 gorillas in photo editing riped off an idea from a small website ColourLovers.com. Not just the idea but the color set for there own site is very similar. I have used the Colour lovers website before its fantastic for finding just the right complementary colors for websites. I used it back in 2005 for my first version of Games games and more games theme.

ColourLovers.com has a good post on all the similarities between the two sites.

This kind of thing angers me allot being a little guy. If I build something, I spent 200 hours getting it running and building a community and a big guy like Adobe or Microsoft steals the idea and makes there own version I have no way of competing with a company that can put unlimited man hours in to a project.

Adobe should do one of three things

• Buy ColourLovers.com
• Close the site down
• Give credit or link heavily back to ColourLovers.com

What are your ideas on this? If a big company steals a little guys project and adds a bunch of features making it “Better” is it right?

Where is gets sticky is if you cant build on other peoples work then there would only be one OS in the world. As far as I know IBM was the first company to build an OS. Windows, Apple’s OS, Linux all came after and I can’t really image a world with out Windows and other compedators.