'Til All Are One

KDE4 devel­op­ment is under­way, and users and developers are hav­ing their say on how it should look. One thing that irks me is when someone posts a mockup of some ‘new’ idea, when in fact that idea is just lif­ted from some­where else. I have no prob­lem with deriv­a­tion or inspir­a­tion from else­where (that’s how soft­ware evolves, after all), but for ghod’s sake please don’t pass off some other idea as your own.

Take for example this mockup. Look at the file browser. Can you say Win­dows Vista? Some per­son, whom I pray is not a Kon­queror developer, was so enam­oured with it that he cre­ated an inter­act­ive ver­sion.

I’m not say­ing that it is unat­tract­ive, but I don’t under­stand why this sort of blind copy­ing takes place. I’ll admit that graphic design isn’t one of FLOSS’s strong points, but with that said we do have some truly innov­at­ive and beau­ti­ful designs. Amarok comes to mind.