I recently, as in yesterday, did a blog post about the website iVoted.com. I have removed that post after being contacted on Twitter by one of the co-founders of Poll Everywhere. He respectfully pointed out the blatant copying and plagiarism of the Poll Everywhere content. Even the plans were eerily similar, not to mention format and several other things. I am not one for supporting copied content. The only difference between the software that I noticed was the ability to post responses to polls on Twitter.
I know that there are several other sites out there that have similar concepts, but the similarities between these two sites is scary. My initial thought was that maybe iVoted.com was the work of Poll Everywhere and they were wanting a different server, but I was informed that was not the case. I felt it was only appropriate to remove my blog post.
This incident once again shows the power of Twitter. I would not have known that Poll Everywhere was upset by this copying of material if the co-founder had not contacted me. Please be aware of this situation and support Poll Everywhere.
I'm Sean Eby, one of the co-founders of Poll Everywhere. Its really unfortunate when dishonest people deliberately take the work of others and worse, when they do so without any attribution to the original creator. While on the one hand we wouldn't condone others using our content directly in the first place (certainly not without permission first), we do welcome people who want to take an innovative and original spin on their own product ideas and implementation.
ReplyDeleteHere is a link to a PDF that shows some of the 100% direct knock-offs that iVoted did:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113538/iVoted_imitation.pdf
We've done with that w/ Poll Everywhere. In fact, there was a time (early on) where we adopted a lot of nuances of design from 37signals (at least they are in an entirely different business, however) and they contacted us and we immediately complied by changing (and doing original) the work because we felt it was embarrassing to do it that way. At least in that case we weren't any threat to their business since we're very different but in this case, we have a couple foreign developers working on iVoted who have decided that it's OK to take the work of others without attributing the work (at least) or better yet, being original and thinking through the problems at-hand themselves and doing it differently.
This isn't even about competition or alternatives but instead about being honest, having some integrity, and being original and innovative. Not to mention behaving in good spirits and with respect to others in the world around you.
We appreciate the honesty of others, including your own honesty, Michael, by recognizing that as a group, we don't respect or welcome people when they copy others' work without permission or attribution; we certainly don't teach our kids to do it. What is it that they say? Good artists copy, great artists steal? Well, in this case, the "Great artist" would have stolen the idea but would have done something new, different, better, or original.