Copying Software Ideas

Just wandering about this...

Let's say I was able to create something very similar to Citydesk. The only thing different are the some gui-elements, but besides that it's the same....

How (il)legal will that be?

ps. no... i am not doing this :)

Guyon Morée
Friday, November 7, 2003

If you're writing it from scratch, there isn't anything legally stopping you.

See: Apple v. Microsoft, Lotus v. Borland.

Tim Sullivan
Friday, November 7, 2003

Exactly mimicing exact functionality is not against the law. Stealing code is. Compaq got away with this when they did the first BIOS implementation for their PC clone.

Patrik
Friday, November 7, 2003

don't just rewrite it, add your own ideas as well. make a good competition for fogcreek. in that case they will respect you, and won't delete this thread :)

name not available
Friday, November 7, 2003

do you think citydesk or fogbigz was an original idea?

Tom Vu
Friday, November 7, 2003

Joel was very aware of Ethan Winer & Frontier / Manilla / Radio, but I have to say CityDesk is a pretty novel idea.

As far as I know, there are no other players in the desktop content management space, otherwise we'd be talking about cloning CityDesk and/or something else.

Fogbugz does look like "yet another bugtracking software package," but Philo tells us it's very good.

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, November 7, 2003

Macromedia Contribute?

H. Lally Singh
Saturday, November 8, 2003

I doubt that City Desk makes significant money.

Jarred
Saturday, November 8, 2003

"no other players in the desktop content management space"

Dude, google is your friend.  There's a ton of products out there.  Even some that work as a desktop app that ftps to a server.

No one owns the space though.

windows hacker
Saturday, November 8, 2003

Jarred,

Fog Creek is able to pay some impressive rent, do renovations and keep a number of staff members paid with FogBUGZ and CityDesk.

I suspect they're doing alright.

Tim Sullivan
Saturday, November 8, 2003

windows hacker,

I don't doubt that there are programs out there that can be run from the desktop and programmed to FTP files up to your server, but I haven't seen a lot of products that really "occupy this space," as you say.

DMOZ / Google pointed me to this page:

Computers > Software > Internet > Site Management > Content Management > Desktop Applications (11)

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Site_Management/Content_Management/Desktop_Applications/

Manilla I mentioned, Globescape requries a server install, Cyberteams has no product information and crashed my browser, EditLive! looks like it might do this, but I'm not sure. Those are the products mentioned above CityDesk.

I know someone who configured PHP Nuke to produce static HTML pages and FTP them, but that's not exactly how it's supposed to be used.

I'd definately like a look at anything you'd have to offer.

www.MarkTAW.com
Saturday, November 8, 2003

Movable Type (and probably a bunch of other blog software) could also be used this way--run local, then mirror the resulting pages to the server. You could even imagine building an installer which packaged it up with a mini web server + ftp synchronizer, which is what Radio Userland is.

But that's not the target market.

mb
Sunday, November 9, 2003

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